I just saw another of those Daily Kos has Become a Cesspit Because of Something Thoughtless or Offensive in the Comments diaries that always seem to end up on the recommended list. And at the fringes of the comments, as always, were those eager to pile on in agreement and those who chose to defend the inalienable right to be thoughtlessly (and thoughtfully) offensive in reaction to the very deliberately offensive nature of the current “conservative” base.
You read it before. You’ll read it again. I suspect diaries of this sort, full of hyperbole as they tend to be, serve a generally positive purpose in the maintenance of the community’s tone. But there’s a different story about the tone of this community, as expressed in the comments, that I would like to tell.
Been here a long time. Second diary in all that time and I haven’t made a whole lot of comments, either. I argue, and since the recent electoral unpleasantness I have mostly tilted (I realize it’s a Don Quixote exercise, or at best Sir Palamedes) at those waves of coordinated disinformation and false identification that have become one of the regressive right’s preferred weapons. But this story isn’t about me. It’s about the Daily Kos community, as expressed in the comments.
A couple months back there was some new step in the slap-fight between the occupant of the White House and morning show host Joe Scarborough. The Occupant and a coordinated social media wave attack tried to swamp the clear and present danger of a morning show host with the suggestion that the morning host was involved in coverup, murder, and was perhaps the murderer himself. In this attack they arrayed, in their hateful multitude, an article that “proved” their barrage of innuendo to accusation was not just a new conservative smear.
Over the course of a few hours this link was posted hundreds of times, often pointing out the left-leaning nature of the source. Sometimes they even made it a joke:
I started giggling as soon as I saw the first one. And although yes, I did check (because on very rare occasions passions here do run dangerously high) I knew from that first moment the reply I was going to stick in every one of their timelines:
It got under their skin so much that they tried to rewrite history to make the comments of this community stop burning.
I won’t bore you with any more. Let’s just say that I was gifted with the opportunity to point this out in a lot of Trumpbot timelines, compare and contrast with Freepers, Dimbarts, and the very people posting the links, and clog up countless conservative timelines with an argument that had nothing to do with morning hosts and everything to do with the difference between how partisan liberals and conservatives conduct themselves. I get blocked by a lot of Trumpies, but this might have been my record day.
All I had to do was tell them to read the comments from this community when it was presented with the sort of story their side slurps up like toxic manna. I knew I could, from the moment I saw the links. Because I might not comment much, but I read the comments a lot.
So no, Daily Kos isn’t broken. Occasional scoldings are probably one of the things that help keep it whole, but on this first day of a new year I thought perhaps it might be fitting to illustrate with an example just how great this community is.
*not an actual Steve King quote.