In response to MadScientist's diaryon how dKos is ruining his life, I long meant to write a diary on how dKos is improving mine.
I have to be honest about one thing, I waste a little too much time reading dKos in the workplace, but the benefits it gives me far outweighs any lost productivity.
Politcal awareness is the first step in dealing with this monstronsity that is BushCo. Now if you would like to know how dKos helped my life, skip over the fold......
While I admit there is an "echo chamber" effect at times, the reason I love dKos is that all the relevant issues are voraciously dissected as this site is awash with wonks of all flavors. There's nothing that adds credibility to arguments and rationales than tons of credible fact-based responses (something that is really missing in the bizarro-land sites such as Free Republic). It's these links that are imbedded in so many excellent diary's that often lead me off to surfing the web for more detailed information on contemporary topics. The fact that dKos can offer to potentially accelerate you through a learning curve on any topic is invaluable to me. Right now some of the assorted diaries on the economic impact of oil and the fallacies in some knee-jerk responses are fascinating and I hope elected officials are reading them.
It's pretty simple how dKos helped me out. It has single handedly energized my political soul like nothing else. While I was like MadScientist in that I kind of blissfully skipped through the Clinton years (he was the first Pres I voted for) thinking the world was finally a great peaceful place and all was right, the initial election debacle that was BushCo should have sounded an alarm, but lucky for me, I was surfing my way through Indonesia and missed the whole thing. I didn't know what the fuck this "hanging chad" shit was that everyone was harping about when I returned. But one thing I could sense right away was America was tangibly different.
I ignored BushCo is his pre-9/11 phase, but post-9/11, you were forced to pay attention. On 9/11 I remember driving back from a meeting at Los Alamos after my flight was cancelled and listening to his speech and in the back of my mind I was thinking, this guy has some pretty sounding speeches, but I can feel that it's being politicized and I'm being spun. In the run up to the Iraq v.2, I was just beside myself thinking, is there anybody sane running the government? There were so many historical precedents why not to occupy a country. So it was the folly of war that eventually led me to dKos, but dKos holds a huge line-up of relevant issues; purely political, social, economic, and so forth.
This influx of information awoke some dormant portion of my mind. I started reading political books, starting with the easy to digest Al Franken stuff, but now I devour contemporary political books, whether they are related to the Iraq debacle, our new imperial presidency, or the trnaformation of the US into a modern theocracy.
I owe all this to dKos, and now my fact-laden brain is ready to dispel Republican myths wherever I am exposed to them (and they are a plenty in Southern California). I am now armed with the one thing that seems to fluster the wingnutters, cold hard FACTS. dKos is not just an assembly of like-minded progressives, it is the gateway drug to knowledge, and I cling to the premise that informed people will always do the right thing.
Thanks to all you Kossacks, who made this possible