Well, they should, anyway.
Too often, here at DailyKos, they don't.
Now, certain Conspiracy Theories (CT) have been banned. One can't allege that the World Trade Center towers collapsed due to controlled demolition, for example. There's evidence available that it wasn't a controlled demolition, so despite the fact that it might have looked, in some ways, like a controlled demolition, the evidence that it wasn't one is overwhelming! One can't assert that the Bush Administration let it happen on purpose (LIHOP). And that's because there's no evidence which would lead a sane, reasonable, and thoughtful person to believe that's the case!
But too often, people get their panties in a wad over an issue, and they allow their preconceived notions of how the world is to blind them to reality, and they leap to unsustainable conclusions, and then publish those unsupportable theories to others of a like mind here.
And what's even worse than CT's and other extraordinary claims without that requisite extraordinary evidence getting pushed here is that they regularly get enough recommends that they end up on the Rec List!
And that's a shame.
According to the founder of this site, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Kos),
The rule for posting such diaries is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
If you can't provide evidence to back up your claim, it is best not to post the diary. This guideline also applies to recommending extraordinary-claims diaries. If a diary makes an extreme claim with little or no evidence to back up that claim, it shouldn't be recommended, no matter what that claim is.
He suggested back in 2005 that DailyKos (DK) is a reality-based community, and that
Diaries advancing 'Conspiracy Theories' (should be) subject to ridicule and derision from the community at the very least.
But too often, that critical review of the diary's content doesn't happen.
I can give you a bunch of examples, but I'll stick with a couple.
Birds died in Arkansas about a week ago. Even Time Magazine covered it. And we had several diaries here that went off the deep end. One of them suggested that it was a possibility that the birds dying in Beebe, Arkansas could be linked to the fish kill 125 miles away on the Arkansas River. But, as I explained in that diary and in others on the same subject, these birds don't have home ranges that extend 125 miles. Their home turf is, at most, 30-40 hectares. They don't fly 125 miles to eat. And so, no, it's not a possibility, as a diary repeatedly asserted, that these birds could have been eating the dead/dying fish and then flown to Beebe to die.
A claim that the two events might possibly be linked needed to be supported by some evidence. Yet there was none. The diarist tried to use the fact that songbirds can fly fast enough to have travelled that distance as evidence that the birds could have fed there, then travelled 125 miles. But that's not evidence, since these birds don't travel that far to eat and then roost! Given that fact, the wildlife officials should have dismissed that possibility.
And despite the clear and undeniable debunking of a linkage between the fish kill and these bird dying, the diary was never updated to reflect that refutation. That blatant rejection of reality that destroyed the diarist's assertion that it was possible that the birds dying and the fish dying could be related is problematic behavior!
And the diarist wrote
Isn't it a little unusual for "disease" to abruptly kill 100,000 fish and 6,000 birds in a single day, over a very limited geographic area? Wouldn't we expect to see other deaths among the same species in other areas?
But, in fact, it's not unusual for disease to abruptly kill tens of thousands of a single species of fish, and for a few other species to be adversely affected by a massive fish kill. And it's not unusual for birds to be killed in large numbers either. As the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., said
"In the last 10 years we have logged 188 cases just involving birds with mortality exceeding 1,000 animals per event," the USGS expert told the WSJ.
Other experts echoed that opinion to the AP.
More evidence is surfacing every day that the reports of massive dead birds and fish that were found in Arkansas, Louisiana, Nashville, Tennessee and overseas in Sweden, Brazil, New Zealand and the UK are not unusual.
The diarist leapt to an unsupportable conclusion that this is an unusual series of events, and despite having it explained to him/her that it wasn't, he/she refused to acknowledge that.
The guesses by experts that it could have been lightning or hail that killed the birds were later ascribed to have been suggestions as to what did happen, rather than educated guesses about what might have happened. But they were realistic suggestions that were only proven to be incorrect when we had better info about when the birds died. The diarist and other posters continued to try to taint the statements of other users by alleging that they had bought into that possible explanation of the cause, rather than the reality that we were simply saying that it was a possibility.
And the diary that was the main one on this topic has been updated with this commentary.
Original title: Fish Die, Birds Drop From the Sky; Nothing to See Here
This originally was a serious diary, about the failure of government authorities to investigate mass wildlife kills in a way that proactively protects public health, does not arbitrarily close off potentially productive avenues of investigation and aims to produce results quickly, in case the cause poses an threat to the public. Based on my experience as a WMD preparedness expert working with government agencies to identify and mitigate threats, these are reasonable expectations. In an age of terrorism, old assumptions are potentially deadly.
However, polite debate came to a screeching halt when a pack of individuals, working in concert, shut down meaningful discussion using the tactics typical of trolls: personal attacks, false accusations, derision, long diatribes, unreasonable demands, and sheer nonsense. This diary stands as testament to the power of a few individuals to stifle questioning of public health policies and to shut down useful debate.
But that's not really what happened. There was never any evidence that the government wasn't doing their due diligence in investigating this event. Skilled wildlife employees looked at the fish kill on the Arkansas River, and determined, using their experience and their training to determine that the likely cause of the demise of those fish was some sort of species-specific event. The diarist didn't understand that experts in this sort of endeavor can do this. They were going to do testing, but had come to preliminary determinations. This diarist was told that they didn't understand how long the follow-up examination and testing will take, instead suggesting that there was some concerted effort to delay further info until this fish kill had fallen off the radar of most people. However, there's no evidence of that. None. Not. One. Shred.
The diarist also tried to claim that there should be questioned raised about the concern that the officials had for the public's health because those who collected the dead birds and fish wore protective suits, but weren't telling the public that there was any danger. But the public officials and commenters in the diary fully explained why they would wear the suits even when they didn't believe that the public was at any risk! It never seemed to sink in though - the belief that there might be something nefarious here, despite a total lack of evidence of any of that, was unshakeable.
And when a group of people tried to explain to the diarist and his/her fans that this was the case, they were treated like trolls, like they were trying to stifle discourse. But, again, there's no actual evidence of that. That diarist claimed that she/he had been misquoted. But it didn't happen. When challenged to provide evidence of any misquoting, it never materialized. And that's because it didn't actually happen. The diarist twisted the words of others in order to continue to support his/her nonsense about there being insufficient thought/concern/investigation on the part of the wildlife people in Arksansas before they made preliminary determinations. There's absolutely no evidence that those people didn't do what they should have done to protect the public's health. None. The diarist leapt to conclusions that weren's supportable given the evidence we had, or the more in-depth knowledge about the event that officials on the scene had. This diarist has supposedly seen unreasonable behavior on the part of public officials in the past, and so this diarist suspects everyone even when there's no evidence that there's reason to suspect them individually.
That's unsupportable in a reality-based community. That's an extraordinary claim without the requisite extraordinary evidence.
And that's the pushback that the diarist got. That's the pushback that Kos demanded, and said would be the minimum that anyone should expect when publishing a diary that made those extraordinary claims.
Here's another one. We had a diary back in the summer that pushed the unsupported accusations of a known liar and a banned contributor to DK about purported election fraud in Shelby County, Tennesseee (Memphis). The diary's title asserted that vote fraud had been "documented".
Except it hadn't been. Not at all. Not in any way, shape or form. Yet, rather than evaluate the diary, and look at the evidence, way too many people wanted to believe that the Republicans in the metropolitan Memphis are would be willing to commit vote fraud in order to win a local election. And so, without the requisite evidence of any fraud, the diary zoomed onto the Rec List, and stayed there for a long time.
{Now, I'm not saying that some Republicans might not be willing to commit vote fraud in order to win elections. I'm simply saying that there was no evidence of any fraud. And that's what we should be using when evaluating a diary - evidence. And an extraordinary claim of election fraud requires extraordinary evidence, which never happened in this case.}
And who provided that "evidence" of vote fraud that wasn't really evidence at all? Why, it was Bev Harris, of Black Box Voting (BBV). BBV and Bev Harris have never actually been proven right in any of their major accusations. The potential for election fraud and vote fraud has existed for a while, and that's undeniable. What they've done wrong is to assert that they've uncovered evidence of actual election fraud, when they have only ever uncovered the potential for election fraud.
Now, should we be concerned about plugging gaps that might allow those potential election fraud vulnerabilities to be taken advantage of? Of course. Without a doubt, without question - however strongly you want me to assert that I am not in favor of risking the impact of anyone's franchise, I'll do that.
But that doesn't mean that anyone should get their diary which states that vote fraud has been documented on the Rec List when there's no actual evidence of vote fraud having actually happened in this community. The fact that we need to be on alert for potential vote fraud doesn't mean that allegations that aren't supported by the evidence should be bought into by the DK community! But they were.
And those of us who railed against the diary's premise were called all kinds of names. Those of us who pointed out that Bev Harris wasn't a reliable source were told that we must not care about election fraud, or we must be unaware of how often it happens. But there's very minimal evidence in the last 30 years of any examples of any substantive election fraud going on.
Given the evidence we have now and we had back in August, there were no votes stolen in Memphis. There was no evidence of votes being stolen in Memphis. Yet the diarist said that there was - that it'd been "documented".
What had been documented? That there was a discrepency between the total votes showing in one list versus the total votes on a similar list. But there was no evidence that those two vote totals on those two lists should be exactly the same. As it turns out, there was a very simple explanation as to why those two vote totals weren't the same. And those arguments were made, in that diary, shortly after it was posted. I won't rehash all of it here, because my diary here isn't about rehashing that - it was already documented in that diary and 2 other diaries I published on this topic that BBV misinterpreted a simple, explainable discrepency and claimed it was evidence of election fraud.
There was also human error in that election. I expect that many elections have some human error in them. History tells us that almost all of the time, the small human errors are either caught or are negligible, and history also tells us that almost always, there were no nefarious motives behind those instances of human error! But that human error in that election in Memphis was deemed by Bev Harris, BBV, and the diarist in question to be prima facie evidence that there was a concerted plan to affect the election results.
But there was no evidence of any collusion, of any purposeful attempt to stop any voters from getting to cast their ballots. Not one shred of evidence. Not. One. Shred. And so, according to the way that I read the FAQ's and Kos' statements, the diary should have subject to "ridicule and derision from the community at the very least." Instead, it got pushed onto the Rec List, and those of us who challenged the credibility of Bev Harris, or who pointed out the lack of documentation the diarist advertised in the Diary title were scoffed at and worse.
And what happened later? Well, a Democrat in Shelby County, a member of the Shelby County Election Commission, Myra Stiles, stated categorically that
We have carefully considered all the charges contained in the complaints and are confident that no election fraud or conspiracy occurred.
I diaried on this topic, which got ignored. Now, I know, lots of diaries, even valuable diaries, get ignored. I didn't and don't take it personally. But my point is that a diary with actual evidence got ignored because the fact that vote fraud didn't happen doesn't get one's blood boiling like evidence that election fraud did happen should! But that other diary didn't have that evidence, and it was clear from a simple reading of it.
I later diaried about how the Shelby County election fraud case was thrown out of court. The plaintiffs, Bev Harris, BBV, and a couple of local Dems, made their case. The defense didn't even have to put on a case, although they were prepared to do so. Those who had complained that there was evidence of vote fraud totally failed to provide any documentation that there was actually vote fraud. It didn't exist. There were discrepencies in vote totals on two lists because the two lists weren't counting the same things! The election lawsuit was dismissed in a directed judgment. Independent auditors accounted for the vote discrepencies. That diary, too, got pretty much ignored. The only comments? That I must not care about election fraud, or that I don't care about vulnerable voting machines, or similar comments. People leapt to unsustainable conclusions about me or the diary because it was too important to them to back off their beliefs about the accuracy of that first diary!
And that's a bad way for this site to behave.