This diary is an upgrade of a long comment I left on Kos's diary Thanks. I was replying to this comment, wherein user ProfJonathan asks Kos if a particular user could be unbanned now, and another helpful user subsequently explained hide rating to me. But I want to know more about banning on Daily Kos. It's different than hide rating, yes? Hide rating is community self-policing, and the community can also check and balance? And the banned member, Stranahan, wasn't being abusive, he was saying something unpopular? Tell me how banning works here.
The first two diaries I ever wrote here were on being banned by HuffPo. I turned here in alarm and confusion, talk happened, and things got better. Now I'm banned again on HuffPo, and that drives my concern over banning here on Daily Kos.
I called George Bush a murderer in my last comment on HuffPo that made it through; I made my comment on Marty Kaplan's blog Why Americans Hate Journalism, Part 62, and like I said that comment got accepted:
When we try to imagine "the families of the tens of thousands of American soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq" who want to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for breaking the law, we go straight to the impersonal abstractosphere and promptly lose our ability to comprehend scale. Thousands of people become a mass of units doing a job where stuff happens, and Bush is just part of their machine. But I like Vincent Bugliosi's approach, where Bush is charged with murder. Take this one little Iraqi girl noted in a Daily Kos diary. She is here in the United States now having her foot amputated; it got mangled in a US bombing that cost her sister both her legs above the knees and her brother and another child their lives. That's an equation I can hold far more clearly in my head at one time. These kids didn't volunteer for this. It's murder, and more. http://www.dailykos.com/...
posted Aug 06, 2008 at 05:56:29
The next comment I made a couple days later, in that same blog, was short. I shared a Kossack's witticism I had seen that called the MSM "ignorati" or "ignorazzi" and I upped it a little by calling the Bush admin "ignorazi." That got me banned. Go figure.
HuffPo has this new way of displaying your user comments page that makes your total comment history available, with stats. It used to be just your most recent comments. It's just changed again, but I remember when I got banned about a week ago I checked my comments and learned that of about 1400 total comments I've made since March 2006, 80-some had been blocked. I thought, so many? I wonder what I said. But there's no habeas corpus, so you can't know. It also begs the question, how does HuffPo decide when to ban, versus when to block? What did I say that was so terrible? So terrible that it couldn't have just been blocked instead? I dunno.
One thing I learned from my first DKos diary here about being banned by HuffPo and my followup diary was that it wasn't abusive commenters who were getting banned -- really quite the opposite, and astoundingly so. A lot of Kossacks use the same username on both sites and had also been banned, and you could go through and look at their comment history. We all wondered why we had been banned. And when you read HuffPo comments now, you often see what I would say are flames that even I might HR, which says a lot. I wondered if it was HuffPo's way of weeding out cerebral commenters, to keep their lawn hot and popping. I dunno.
When I got banned the first time on HuffPo, I was angry and alarmed and sounded the alarm as widely as I could. I was being disappeared without being charged, without a check or balance, and I wanted to make visible the disappeared so the world could know. It turns out there's apparently a huge number of us disappeared on HuffPo, we are so common, it's such a usual thing, it doesn't even seem personal. So my frog goes down to slow boil and now that I'm banned again, I just don't care so much. Back then I wrote to Arianna Huffington herself, and she herself got me reinstated. This time I didn't even try. Maybe I'll get around to it, maybe not. I don't feel as much invested in that community anymore. But I don't doubt that HuffPo is harming itself and harming the conversation, and if we are depending on the blogosphere to keep freedom of speech alive then Houston we have a problem. Perception is being invisibly managed, and that is so Cheney, and so dangerous.
UPDATE: ProfJonathan is standing proud against banning:
As Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, the namesake of my undergraduate alma mater, once wrote, "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." Here, DKos has enforced silence on Lee Stranahan. I respectfully disagree.
It would be my privilege to stand with him.
UPDATE #2: I AM UNDEAD AGAIN ON HUFFPO. And I don't know how. I did not contact anyone at Huffington Post. It just happened.