Daily Kos is Ugly and Destructive

Alegre, a diarist at Daily Kos, has denounced the deterioration of debate at the popular left-wing weblog as "ugly and destructive":

I’ve been posting at DailyKos for nearly 4 years now and started writing diaries in support of Hillary Clinton back in June of last year. Over the past few months I’ve noticed that things have become progressively more abusive toward my candidate and her supporters.

I’ve put up with the abuse and anger because I’ve always believed in what our on-line community has tried to accomplish in this world. No more. DailyKos is not the site it once was thanks to the abusive nature of certain members of our community.

I’ve decided to go on "strike" and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution....

Instead, I will put my energy into posting at sites where my efforts aren’t routinely trashed, spammed and ridiculed by a handful of angry, petty and spiteful folks who clearly have too much time on their hands.

This is a strike - a walkout over unfair writing conditions at DailyKos. It does not mean that if conditions get better I won't "work" at DailyKos again. As a regular contributor to the discourse in our community, I would certainly hope to take part in the conversation at DailyKos again some day if we ever get to the point where we’re engaging each other in discussion rather than facing off in shouting matches. But not now. Writers need a safe place to reach out and exchange ideas, to communicate and challenge one another. DailyKos should be that place, but its tone, its essence has evolved into something ugly and destructive. Good writers can't survive in that kind of atmosphere. Democrats shouldn't have to put up with that from fellow Democrats.

Well, actually, I dont' think Americans should have to put up with that from anyone, Democrats or otherwise.

What's interesting about this is Alegre's framing of the controversy as a "job action," a move taken under the assumption that withholding labor will help to bring the administration to its senses, and change working conditions.

Alegre would have been better to have offered a more compete condemnation of Daily Kos, and to have quit posting at the nihilish hell-hole once for all. "Working conditions" will not get better, since there's nothing to improve. The whole mindset from Markos on down is that Kos is the Democratic Party's future - an affliction I've called "Daily Kos Syndrome." They think they know everything, and if Obama's the massiah, look out for anyone not toeing the radical line.

Every now and then some of the stuff that comes out at Daily Kos that is just unbelievable, absolutely beyond the pale.

A couple of weeks ago a Kos poster blamed the Times Square bombing on some extreme right-wing fearmongering conspiracy. In December, a Kos post from "Troutfishing" equated Christian evangelical military personnel as religious soldiers, no better than Palestinian suicide bombers.

Markos Moulitsas encourages it all, and that's what really is sick about the whole Kos enterprise (since Kos positions himself as a mainstream leader of the party, while his blogging minions mount the most unhinged attacks and smears imaginable).

What's happening now at Kos and the Alegre "strike" is the latest in the disastrous internecine bloodletting taking place at the base of the Democratic Party.

See my earlier post to that effect, "Crash: More on the Coming Democratic Train Wreck."

See also the additional analysis at Memeorandum.