Don't give them a reason to be able to say it about us.
"They are just crazy over there, eating their young and foaming at the mouth."
Sound familiar?
Do you all want the headline on The Drudge Report to read:
Gun-hating Liberals on Daily Kos in War to the Death over Sanders & Clinton.
Worse yet, have it be true.
What I mean to say is...
I've seen my share of Primary Election Hell at the GOS. But this cycle? Have all of you lost your fucking minds?
There is an undeniable portion of the Sanders supporters who (omg how can I say this and not sound like an asshole) who can't see the "you've gone too far" line, and they leap right over it and dash off. Some of them do it repeatedly. In the same diary.
The other half of the problem is that there are Clinton supporters with the same malfunction.
Which makes discussion of the Presidential Primary race problematic. No matter what you write or how you write it, either very few people will read it or it will have 300 comments and 256 of them will be jab and riposte over some imagined slight, just like in the last diary about the race you read.
But some of them, in both crowds, are people of long-standing here at Daily Kos. People whom you've 'spoken with' in the threads, over the years. People who always seemed perfectly nice and reasonable individuals. People whose words you may have even admired, if from afar. Now, they've turned into a Mr Hyde version of themself, and you don't know how to respond anymore.
I know that I've been a bit aggressive in some comments the past couple of months. But for god's sake, if there is a story which has been diaried and discussed and fought over like it was the friggin' original Constitution, can we lay that one to rest. For at least a fucking week or two? Please?
Bernie Sanders has some votes on guns most of us would rather he changed his public stance on. He may, but he probably won't. But he gets a D- lifetime rating from the NRA. He's no stooge of the Gun Nuts.
Hillary Clinton did tell a tall tale about being in a plane getting fired upon when landing, she later apologized for aggrandizing her story. But there's no fucking story in either the Benghazi incident or the Emails in the private server. The Republicans would have literally burnt her at the stake for witchcraft by now if she'd done anything wrong in either of those two instances.
Anything else bitched about concerning these two candidates for the Democratic nomination to be our Candidate come next July? It's bullshit or a Republican meme they're trying to get us to fight with each other over. That last one? It's true. I've read a number of reliable pieces reporting that conservative think tanks have paid "faux Democrats" to join Democratic online communities to sow dissension in the ranks. Daily Kos isn't the only place it's happening. Do you belong to Facebook and any sort of political group? You've probably seen comments in the posts which seemed overly aggressive or overly anti-Clinton or anti-Sanders.
So please, take these words offered up with my best of intentions...
10 million visits to the Orange Clubhouse here every month. Every month, and we haven't even gotten to the Debates or actual primaries/caucuses yet!
Do we really want 10 million people to visit next month to watch us sling trash at each other, and gang up on each other, and act just dreadful and mean and nasty to each other?
I thought our motto here was:
Came for the Politics, stayed for the Community
Where the hell is the Community lately?
Grow the fuck up folks. Rein in your tempers. Stop trolling the diaries of the candidate you don't want, and by trolling I mean - stay the hell out of there! Those folks don't want even your less-than-snotty comments. They are writing those diaries to join ranks with the other people who LIKE THEIR CANDIDATE. That's not you.
You have a bunch of other diaries available to you, written by people likely to be sharing the latest GOOD or even GREAT NEWS about the candidate which YOU ARE CERTAIN will be coming out of the Convention next year as our next President. For the sake of comity right here among the people who were your friends before this election and will (godz willing) be your friends AFTER it's over, stay on your own side of the fucking line.
Please. Pretty please. With sugar on top.
Because I don't EVER want to be ashamed of the people I call my friends here; of the people who write the words I'd rather read than those written by anyone else in the entire world (ok, not Diana Gabaldon, but she made up Jamie Fraser, she gets a pass); of this Community which I've watched grow and grow and grow for 12 years, as of next Thursday, on the 15th of October
I love you guys. Even the ones who've pissed me off so badly lately that I've sent you Kmail messages to bitch at you less publicly, and for that I apologize. It was uncalled for, and I hope you'll forgive me. You are welcome to post a comment and ask me to repeat that apology to you publicly. I will.
Please stop fighting about those two people. One of them is going to be our next President. Some of us are going to get our little hearts broken next spring. We're going to need each other to recover.
So that we can take back up the important work that's been happening here for the past five years now.
Black Kos members are reaching out to ask (the rest of) us white people (some are already members) to come join their group, they don't have a race requirement, all shades of human are welcome. Maybe you'll learn something, that wouldn't be a bad thing, right? I've dropped in on a few of those diaries. I'll try and make it a more frequent occurrence.
The Campaign Zero organization needs to wrangle up the many and various tentacles of the Black Lives Matter movement, because for a movement to have lasting effect it MUST have Legislative goals enacted into Law. Or it will fade away into history without a single paragraph to denote its existence 100 years down the road. How many of you have been writing in the #BLM oriented diaries of Shaun King and Frank Vyan Walton and a lot of others, and want to see something done about Police Violence in our society. If we can't learn to get along here, with our WORDS, how can we expect to ever see people getting along out in the world? Be the change you seek, right?
Meteor Blades and navajo have been building an actual political force out in the real world, with the Connect! Unite! Act! groups. If you've never read a CUA diary, click here and check out that map right at the top of every diary, showing how many groups are out there and where they are. What if one of them is in your city. Will you take one more action and join that group, maybe attend their next MeetUp out in the world?
A Voter Advocacy project has been going on in Virginia this year. 90for90.org has seen over 100,000 newly registered voters added to their Rolls. Gordon20024 has been writing a diary a day about some of the great Democratic candidates for the Virginia Statehouse this November. Perhaps those 100,000 new voters will help tip the scales in those races and help turn the red tide in Virginia to blue, and turn the political chattering class on it's ear. Gordon is proving that just one person can make a difference, when they reach out to others to help them spread a #GoodWord.
Imagine that same project playing out in the other 49 States, sending not just a Democratic President to D.C. in January of 2017, but a bunch of progressive members to the US & Statehouse Congresses, too...
because it could happen with the work of people like me and you, but not if we're locked in mortal struggle over which of two decent people we will ALL be getting behind late next summer to ensure no War on Women waging, troglodyte conservative sneaks into The People's House in 2017.