Free speech. Every forum should embrace free speech if they seek to create powerful ideas.
I would never claim we should have free speech at daily kos because we are legally bound to. Not at all, it is not legally bound. I think that free speech is valuable in itself. I would hope all liberals felt that way. The legal requirement for free speech is to require the dogmatists and conservatives to allow it... liberals allow it naturally.
When there is free speech two heads are better than one, but when there is not free speech, two heads are stupider than one. Free speech makes the group collaboration process healthy and creative instead of dysfunctional and repressed.
(Metadkos VLOG at YouTube: in which I address Hunter's claim I'm a petty anarchist egotistical dumbfuck.)
It doesn't need to be protected because it's fragile, or tolerated as if it were dangerous... we need it, it does us good.
Put in terms of a group blog, it does good as a matter of the group thought process. When you have conversation within a group of people, the conversation "evolves", as we say, and at any given moment the conversation could be described. The conversation has a "state". That state is metaphorically the current "thought" of the group. It's more complicated than most individuals' views, because this "state of the conversation" includes all sides of the conversation. It is more whole, more like reality which always has competing perspectives within it. Less dogmatic because individuals have been conditioned to accept and support just one side using the fiction that only one side is valid, and the validity of the other sides is illusion.
But many sides can be valid, and will be, and many sides will seem valid while we study them. We need all the liberal and progressive ideas validated, that's how you move the window in our direction. I remember in the 80s arguing for nationalized healthcare... the general mood was that made you some sort of socialist, even among Democrats, that was crazy talk. There was this very same atmosphere of fear, and complaints "that makes us look bad!", "don't talk crazy shit like National Healthcare!", "They'll say we're commies." But we do talk it. Someone has to, that's how it stays viable and becomes a real option in the future, and politics is about the future.
This thinking is the source of my defense of One Pissed Off Liberals' attempt to defend his writing style in the face of those that claim his standards are not appropriate. I agreed that OPOL had both a right and duty to answer his critics, especially since it had turned into an issue of style, invoking his use of art and the mere fact that his are opinion pieces by design. Will Liberal Christians be told their invokation of spiritual imagery, of right and wrong, is dangerous and stupid? Why can't OPOL invoke secular but spiritual notions of right and wrong too? We know wrong was committed, we don't disagree on that, we only disagree on what we can prove.
Frankly, I think all the writing here is essentially opinion pieces, sometimes referenced with the sources of ideas that contributed, theoretically, to the opinion given... but still just opinion. We are not primary sources, except of anecdotes, not even secondary, but tertiary commentators. That is not criticism, obviously I think that's great or I wouldn't still take part. I think it's important, we are the most abstract thinkers, really. In a Democracy the voters are philosophers.
Though it is fair when some take on the airs of academic credibility for their mere blogs, and while it's fair to emphasize some concept of peer review even, it is absurd when such a person turns around and seeks to "raise" the discourse of others to their supposedly higher standards. The TANG memos the Hunter wrote to summarize why the memos were not forged were full of links and facts. They collected everything dkos was putting out, selected the strongest, and presented a compelling summary. Compelling but false in the end, evidently we were tricked by forgeries of documents that most likely did exist... ironically, those that wrote in the OPOL type of spirit on that subject were correct... Bush did get out of TANG duty using privilege, but the scholarly article some thing should be the only sort of diary written at dkos, turned out to be false. It was not a big deal because it was blog information, it's all pending outside confirmation. Do not believe what you read... right away, just remember and keep asking.
OPOL's diaries do nothing to stop us from remembering and keep asking.
It is especially absurd when the same people show no ability to discern the principle ideas in the diary in question, seeing nothing there, they say. Hunter came and blasted me about the argument, he complained nothing GOOD was going on in that diary, and yet... he complained that there was an argument going on by joining it with more flame, with escalation, by taking part only in that side of the debate. Meanwhile in other subthreads there WAS in fact productive conversation going on. He denied it, he ignored it, he pretended it wasn't there and got upset that it wasn't... but his action was only to increase what he complained about.
The tendency here, not by Hunter but in general at dkos, is to make these kinds of broad "quality" and "credibility" accusations against those further to the left. And this is another reason I endorse progressives that stand up against it. There is a self-destructive need among some Democrats to really want people like OPOL and his readers gone. Get out of here! Off dkos, out of the party, off the airwaves, out of sight as a shame. "You make us look bad." Us is people that want to call themselves "liberal" while supporting the status quo, which is by it's nature, somewhat conservative.
And yet, the same ones carry a pet peeve for Nader voters. Do you not see how this goes together? Bitch out OPOL and by extension his readers... and also bitch when these people are sick to death of you as much as Republicans. You don't see how that's happening? I wish you'd see, because you are always expression confusion about why people vote Nader, vote Green, or feel no love for the Democratic Party... it's because of how those people are treated, their ideas marginalized, their values mocked.
I think you should find a place in your political geography for those calling for impeachment. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM, but I think, I KNOW, they deserve a place at the table at this point. A lot more than those former Bush voters do! A lot more! Fair is fair! They've called for years now and YOU WERE AMONG THEM some of the time, maybe not calling out, but grinning and nodding. It's not like you really disagree. The REAL disagreement is over minutia, over framing, over when an investigation becomes a prosecution and this sort of technical detail. The real truth is that OPOL's calls for impeachment really are EXACTLY LIKE calls for investigation, but with the frame of "corrupt administration"... that's a valuable frame you WANT to keep alive. So some have too high a hope that these things really do track to the President, a little indulgence of hope is not a bad thing.
We need to integrate our ideas when this happens. I see the integration, we all should... and when people have said about your idea, "it's anti-intellectual, you are bad, a propagandizer and irrational"... then you have to take that face on. The only way to bring the ideas together at that point is to say, "hold on, I reject that, it makes me feel thus, and back at you: some rude feedback". You know what, it worked, click that diary and read Major Danby's participation. He got it. He got the integration of his point and why OPOL was feeling the press, why he didn't like it, and a bit how the readers are reacting.
There is nothing inherently unproductive about that. And if such diaries are too painful for you:
(1) don't come in
(2) if you do, don't make it "worse" by your own definition, doing only what you complain you don't want done.
(3) don't say you plan to bring a gun, that's ugly.
Personally, on impeachment, it's not even to the investigation yet, I'm not concerned with that debate, but I am concerned with people trying to tell the progressive side of the debate to remove themselves. I also am concerned that this coalition does not know how to respect all sides. This coalition shows conservative standards in terms of "there being more than one side to an argument"... namely, that there is exactly ONE CORRECT SIDE, and we are only here to find it.
Yes, I am able and do respect all coherent sides (some sides are invalid). That does not mean I'm always respectful... but generally, I do ok. Hunter's complaints there hinge on how damaging the discourse is in such a diary... and yet many of the subthreads had productive conversations which I wonder why Hunter missed. Of course, this was not true of Hunter's subthread, not least of all because of his input.
When I endorsed the idea that OPOL should fight back... Hunter showed his approval of low brow fighting in a comment attacking me which goes far beyond anything else you'll see in that thread, I think, and light years beyond my own style of conflict. Far beyond the kind of rant I've ever endorsed because it's wrapped too tight to understand which part is his pet peeve being inflamed, which part a blog-show vaudeville number, and which is actual criticism of my participation. I answer it in the youtube video linked below because it was not totally random, Hunter knows who I am even if he doesn't understand who I am.
As I say, Hunter thinks I want the fight when really what I want is Fighting Democrats, I want a progressive to stand up to their detractors, including those to their right in the Democratic Party. Just because we share a party doesn't mean you get to throw bullshit that conservatives don't get to throw... in fact, it should mean you were less likely to throw that.
I don't think it's just his "style" that people object to, I think some subjects are themselves considered taboo and too radical, and this is the objection, that and the fact that there is an audience to recommend such progressive angst and ideals.
There is a desire to control the message, to find the best side of the argument and stay there... but I believe that progressivism is a conversation, the positions are complex like states of conversations are, meaning they have many sides which counterbalance one another.
Everyone can be who they are! You don't have to fill a role in our machine, our machine is built out of the roles that progressives and liberals naturally fill as individuals. The poets add poetry, the graphic artists add graphics, the scholars add heavily linked collections of information. Our organizational task is to find something useful for them to do given their already extant perspective. They will change themselves, we don't have to change them, they will change themselves.
It is just a faith, but I believe there is a place for everyone. I think we can let everyone on the left be themselves, and that we can also then specialize based on our unique selves. It won't be by coincidence that a working system can assemble that way, it's human nature, there is a natural spread in the type of human specifically to cover the needs of humans as social creatures, to get the complex job of survival under control requires the complex positions that including multiple counterbalancing individual positions.
On impeachment... the law and order procedure types should not be calling for impeachment, for them, it's too early. People like Pelosi, her staff, other's directly involved, should take this tack... but the op-ed types SHOULD mention impeachment, they should say, "we don't know" and "only if the president is found culpable" but also "but from what we know there have been decisions, culpable decisions, and if the President was making the decisions..." and even "we might not prove it because of plausible deniability, but the President is morally and ethically responsible for XYZ, and those ought to be impeachable". In the forum of an op-ed, or blog, that's perfectly acceptable and even better... it keeps the idea out there and there is nothing wrong, NOTHING, with the idea that this president should be impeached.
The idea that it would be better politically... that doesn't matter any more, in your dream world we could pretend impeachment wasn't on the table but as I said, we've called for it (we blogs, not me personally) for 4+ years! It's not going away from out side, and we don't want it to, we like the people that think he should be impeached... and even if it DID go away, the right would still hold it against us. They will say it's political and about hating the president.
There are poets and scholars, scientists, engineers, house painters, cooks, and on and on, each with their own ways of interpreting the world and giving feedback.
I think to be good progressives and proper liberals we have to realize that people get to decide what they think on their own. Stop struggling against that, please stop struggling and let people express themselves. Give them feedback or ignore them, but don't try to tell them to shut up... please, information needs to be free.
We are not here to instruct each other. We are not here to make other people do things, we are here to instruct ourselves, to make ourselves do things.
(Metadkos VLOG at YouTube)