I love a great righteous rant. There is nothing more motivating or more energizing. A roomful of snark, ridicule and derision is a natural habitat, in this age of casual detachment.
Still, I can see there's a mess to clean up here, so somewhat sympathetic to Markos's efforts to empty the trash.
My comment about mosh pits was really a request for more tolerance. Punk rockers tend to veer off into libertarianism if not reminded of harsh social realities. Let's not alienate a group who are natural allies, just because they look bad and are rough and tumble, and might sometimes barf in the punch bowl at the nice, polite Democratic fundraiser.
The Groucho Marxists here will appreciate author Joe Adamson's description of his personality:
The mind of Groucho Marx was always working, but it just wasn't allowed to be told what it should be working at. All you had to do was pressure him into doing something, and you could be certain his nimble brain would conjure up an overriding compulsion for its opposite. The greater the encouragement to mingle in a crowd and crack funny jokes, the greater would be his natural inclination to go off in a room by himself, play the guitar, read a book and worry about something. Usually you couldn't get a good gag out of him until he was encased away in a cathedral and surrounded by obsessionist zealots who were guaranteed not to be amused...
About one of Groucho's movie characters, Adamson wrote something like, he dropped his dignity when dignity was called for, and exercised it when there was no use for it at all.
Am I hung up on the notion of being contrary for its own sake? Yeah, I think so. I was born in 1960, the year The Cat In the Hat was published. An early printing of the book had a recommendation from Ellen Goodman on the back, saying it took the country by storm and took apart the polite world of Dick and Jane with a jackhammer.
At my girlfriend's house the other weekend listening to NPR -- Weekend Edition or somesuch. The syrupy voice of the chap making underwriting announcements. "The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation," I repeated. "The only way that name could be funnier would be if it was the Richard Wood Johnson foundation." She kind of chuckled. "You say the strangest things!". Last Monday, caught part of Talk of the Nation, wasting [to paraphrase Tom and Ray of Car Talk] two perfectly good hours talking about the Tea Party. Host Neil Conan at the beginning: "We want to hear from Republicans this morning -- is the Tea Party helping or hurting you?".
NPR loves covering the Tea Party, in all its contradictions and cross-purpose. They surely had no qualms about filling those two hours with 'Baggers repeating the same old points long ago disproven -- at the expense of a multitude of subjects they could have been covering instead. [Will they still be talking about the Tea Party when we are all treading water?] It would have taken about a minute for them to say the Tea Party is a sham, astroturf, a sort of a bad joke. And then just leave it there. "Dear Dumbo," wrote one of my Facebook friends, "we liked your act a lot better before the insane clown posse."
The crowd at the TP debate cheering for letting the hypothetical uninsured guy in a coma drop dead was chilling and abhorrent. But maybe we should respond in kind? I'm not sure. Consider the source?
Let's not take ourselves or our little echo chamber too seriously. If this site cleanup is really in preparation for outreach, then develop phone and tablet apps, and make it a little less staid and proper. i'd like to see the banner and logo at the top changed daily, ala google. Or something else to make it more fun and unpredictable. I hear the voice of the underwriting announcer when I see headings like 'Recommended Diaries'. Just call it Most Popular on Daily Kos, like a normal person would.
Don't pander to people who don't understand what the site is and how it functions. Let the orange flag fly in all its ragged and vulgar glory.