What do pie, profanity, and atheist angst and fundie fuming all have in common?
They are all basins in which DailyKos washes itself.
We have no choice really.
"It's always something"
-----Roseanne Roseannadanna
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."
---Henry Kissenger Nobel Laureate, Unindicted War Criminal
Take a beaker of near boiling water. Add sugar. Stir. Keep adding sugar and stirring until you see residue in the bottom. Place the beaker in a freezer, or if you're lucky to live in an area with real weather at this time of year, out on the window sill. Place a string so that it hangs in the water. Wait.
You get crystals hanging on the string. Even stranger - you sometimes get crystals forming without a string. Some dust spec or ripple in teh water generates a starting point and the crystals just latch on.
A useful insight into the possibilities here can be gained by considering the concept of basins of attraction. Let us start by thinking of a bowl containing a ball bearing. This will move around the bowl until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest point. We can say that it is 'attracted' to that point, so each part of the bowl can be regarded as leading to that stationary point, and the whole bowl is what we call the basin of attraction of that system. If we place the ball bearing outside the bowl then it will have a tendency to go somewhere else, so we can see that an attractor is only effective within a certain area of space, and we can have many different attractors adjoining each other.
--Chris Lucas
The Kissinger quote above is quite meaningful to me, and I've used it as a comfort as I've licked my wounds after too many flamewars and confused online campaigns. I take the meaning to be that where risk of real loss is small, wagers often lose sight of the value of the prize, and the true cost of the fight. One of my users in the old BBS days put it very well.
He said that the only coin of any value online was reputation. Different reputations for different people - a reputation for veracity, or wit, or being a popular user, or always being right - prevailed, or didn't. Any argument that got out of hand, or where reputation was thought to be at stake, would escalate to the point of absurdity precisely because it was an all or nothing game. You either maintained a reputation or you didn't.
The consequences if you didn't could be at the same time both profound and negligible. If you crashed and burned in on online debate-argument-flamewar you'd lose face in front of people
you had never met. You might have to leave a community
that never existed in real time. An online persona that you may have crafted over years might have to
disappear. You might have to adapt a new screen nym.
But the emotional investment and involvement in the process
is real. The commitment to ideas is genuine. The basis for such sudden shitsorms and flamewars might appear to be pithy to outside observers, but they are quite real to the participants.
What we have at DKos is a super saturated solution. Thousands of egos, wits, and reputations crowded into a "space" that is relatively small. Reputation is a very serious thing here. Don't believe me? Checked the ratings on your comments lately? C'mon, tell me you never do. Here, pull my finger.
Why are people here? Because they support the stated objectives of the place? Maybe - but that answers nothing at all. There is no real proof of clear common purpose when one group expresses as their goal the support of another larger group which itself lacks a clear purpose.
The Democratic Party is not a political party in the true sense. That's all right, neither is the GOP. In other (parliamentary) democracies coalitions are formed after the election. Political parties are formed around affinities and positions. In the USA coalitions are formed before the election, and are based on alliances that sometimes run counter to purpose.
So here at DKos we have a large group of intelligent people (always dangerous - intelligent people are usually the worst sort) who are here most generally (but not exclusively) to promote the election of their particular coalition of interests. But there is no hierarchy of values for these interests. Indeed, there is not even a clear majority agreement as to what these interests or values are. Add the sugar to the beaker.
Place this community under stress (drop the temperature of the water) and there's no telling what they'll latch on to. Don't think there's stress? Fitzmas. Dropping Bush poll numbers. Stress can be caused by good news as well as bad.
So every now and then someone brushes up against something irritating, or gets their nose out of joint (sometimes quite justifiably) over some issue that they may have a large emotional investment in. I don't know that you are atheist / UCC / gay / Black Evangelical / feminist / sensitive to profanity / etc. with a particular personal history of events and positions that cause you to have a particularly strong and personal reaction. But people, caught in the illusion or simulation of real community here react as if we can all read each other's diaries and understand precisely the subtext of our imprecise offerings.
Why does it happen so seemingly regularly that we have a Mongolian Cluster Hump cum Shitstorm over a particular issue? The Pies. The Beach Volleyball Bimbos. Use of Profane Language. Atheism.? Well, if it weren't those it would be something else. Really,
We contribute here in bowls of awareness, and we're constantly falling towards the attractors. As members of this community, as inhabitants of this space, we are no different than other humans - we seek to impose order.
It's no great surprise that every now and then the order gets out of hand.
Can these periodic eruptions be precluded by structural changes? Possibly. Should they be? Why?
DKos is an open and changing system. This is how it is. I can safely predict that in another month or two some ball bearing will drift down to some bowl bottom, attract attention, and (to mix metaphors here) we'll have another runaway snowball of bruised feelings and flamewars.
But ain't it fun?