Monday, September 5, 2011

Note on IPs and Banning by Digby and David and so on



Couple of things.

First, I have a different IP while I'm in New Mexico. Funny how that works.

I did a couple of tests while on the road to discover whether Digby/David were maintaining their ban on my posts in their comments. I was able to post comments under other names and IPs, so I tried my Blogger ID (ie: Ché Pasa) and sure enough, as long as I wasn't posting from my usual IP, no problem. Since my test posts were innocuous, it hardly mattered that they weren't instantly disappeared. Nor would it have mattered if they were. This is the blogosphere. Nothing that appears therein is graven on Golden Plates. The funny thing about it, though, is that you can never get rid of something permanently if you want to. All those posts I made while under ban at Digby's are still there after all. I'm the only one who can see them.

But the other thing is that I've found myself... erm... disinterested in reading more of the same-old same-old from either Digby or David. Yes, of course, I've been quite a loyal Digby reader since long before she set out on her own, and I have enjoyed her insight through the years. Her posts have lost a lot of the energy they once had, and, especially since the grueling marathon of the 2008 campaign, she's become dispirited and far more cynical about the electoral process and candidates than I think she has ever been. But through it all, she's maintained her grounding in yellow-doggedness. Meaning "do not vote for the R" under any circumstances. Sometimes that means defending the indefensible. I think she knows that. It does make for some tough going, and it gets harder and harder to read -- let alone put up with -- her insistence that those people in the White House simply don't know what they are doing.

Sure they do. They're doing what they set out to do and by their own standards they're doing it well. They never set out to do anything for the People. And guess what? They don't. There's your answer. It's very simple.

So the continuing defense of White House "incompetence" is really boring by now. I skip over it.

Then there's David. He seems to be fairly well informed about this and that, but most of it is irrelevant chaff, having little or nothing to do with the important things that matter to real people. Much of what he writes about is "insider" and "process" stuff that is basically about how many different ways you can bullshit the public, or how many distractions and shiny objects you can put up to divert attention from what really matters.

It's a form of deception that is engaged in by all political factions, no less by Democratic Party apparatchiks like David, and it's essentially worthless. It's all a game to him. So I don't even read most of his posts.

I've made quite clear that I see the effort to dis-fellowship the California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus as the most important internal Democratic Party issue -- because it goes far beyond what's happening in California and is the touchstone for progressive dissatisfaction and disinterest in the Democratic Party nationwide -- and David, who is a member of that Caucus (he says) and a member of the executive board (he says) which is "considering" the matter refuses to discuss it at Digby's. He has briefly discussed it at dKos, but only to say that the Progressive Caucus was stupid to pass a resolution to explore primarying Obama, and he doesn't want to discuss it any more, and he doesn't want anyone else to discuss it either. For her part, Digby maintains the Cone of Silence about it.

This is pure party hackery.

The sad thing is that Digby would feel she has some need to give this sort of hackery yet another forum. David already has a happy home at dKos after all.

While I can post comments at Digby's these days, I find I have little interest in doing so.

There really are more important things.

Really!

After all, I'm still immersed in the Bolshevik Revolution....

7 comments:

  1. I sorta notice a change in Digby, too. At first, I took it as just sarcasm and frustration. But now it sounds like she really has been asked to back off and is doing do. Or, perhaps, Obama has just been extremely effective in creating a new normal, well to the right of most ran and file Americans.

    . . . .

    It's funny how with the passing years I care less and less about the two parties anyway. Their arguments are arguments between A and B, instead of A and Z, as circumstances demand. And the "left blogosphere" is a definite part of the problem, because in general, all it does is document the atrocities of the other "side", instead of vigorously pursuing its own, truly distinctive, truly revolutionary alternative.

    (Can it have one, if it so studiously avoids even talking about it?)

    It's become a bore, and I think the bloggers themselves are bored by this trap as well. At least those who are self-aware.

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  2. Thanks for the video as well.

    Enjoying your thoughts on revolution.

    And on PoMod. Reminds me of Socrates and Euthyphro. Socrates fences with him a bit, after getting him to refine his thoughts on piety. Euthyphro eventually argues that what pleases all the gods is what is pious.

    "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious? Or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

    Socrates may have been our first Post Modernist.

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  3. I don't read all that many blogs. I'm more of an "online newsletter" kind of guy, tending to rotate through sites like Counterpunch, Rolling Stone, The Exiled, etc.

    However, sometimes I'll follow a blog, but I've never seen anything like the Reign of Atkins over at Hullabaloo. I've seen bloggers get sick of blogging and quit for a while, and I've seen slow evolutions in a blogger's political perspectives (sometimes causing me to drop them, if they change to much from what originally attracted me). This is the first time I ever saw a blog bring on an ideological enforcer specifically tasked with knocking heads and getting the proles into line.

    I mean, have I just missed this happening elsewhere? Are there other blogs that have done this?

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  4. I honestly don't know what Digby's current development is all about. It's bizarre on the surface, and it's not like her. She's had co-bloggers for a long time, but they were/are nothing like the Atkins. She calls him her "friend" and maybe she's just blinded by friendship.

    But she's got to know that it looks like something has gone really haywire over there. She's a good writer, he's a Party hack.

    All I can point to is that she got beat up pretty bad for insufficient Obama love during the 2008 campaign. She defended Hillary. She wasn't pushy about it, but she was savaged by Obamabots, who called her every name in the book, often, and with extraordinary malice. It was really brutal. And when Obama won the nomination, Digby was... skeptical. For a while. And then she got on the bus, as it were, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, but she did it. And ever since, she's been modestly critical of Obama, but there's little or no passion any more.

    I have a hard time believing that she wanted David as a co-blogger. I've felt he was "suggested" to her by certain parties in the blogosphere as someone who could do two things: bump up the hit count, and bring in Party loyalists -- even if they are skeptical of Obama like she and apparently David are.

    Party loyalty is supposed to trump skepticism. I found I could not be a Party loyalist given the behavior I witnessed (and David models) of high-handed bullying and deception that the Party was riddled with when I was a Democratic activist. Those who questioned its ways were supposed to suck it up and shut up -- or be gone; the argument was that the Democratic Party was the oldest political party in the country, and as an institution, it "knew" best.

    Yes, it "knows" like the Bourbons "knew."

    Bringing that kind of sensibility -- if you want to call it that -- into a well-established political blog that has never been into rigid party loyalty is jarring to say the least.

    But that's what she's done, and I wonder if she's getting ready to retire from the rat-race. She's been at it a long time.

    Maybe she's just... tired.

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  5. As for the Internationale and such, I've always liked the song -- I like the Marseillaise, too. The sentiment isn't bad, either. I'd love to see a large group of Americans commence to sing it lustily, say in October, say in Freedom Plaza. Might scare the bejesus out of the 'baggers. Well, once That Socialist Obama explains it to them. Heh. Of course "lefty" bloggers would not approve. Tsk. Tsk.
    --------------------------
    Meanwhile Cu-hool, the post on Revolution and the "Theater Theatrical" is sort of a preliminary draft of the beginning of that series I mentioned a while back. The premise is basically that the experimentation and realization that leads to Revolution often begins in the arts and theater especially, and it works by opening minds to possibilities that were never thought of or taken seriously before. A staid form like theater under the Tsars becomes a hotbed for the Revolution on the horizon.

    Meyerhold I think became a Bolshevik after the failure of the 1905 Revolt and his sense of the potential of theater changed radically.

    But once the Revolution succeeds, the theater and other arts revert, though they may still celebrate the Revolution, less and less convincingly, until there is another period of revolt and ferment and realization.

    Americans have been there, but they're not there now. I'm hoping there will be signs of re-awakening in the arts and theater, though. Soon.

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  6. I agree. Revolution starts with the arts. It's our collective dream factory. The Republic of Letters is always there first, long before political action is taken.

    It's certainly not an original observation, but it may well be that our supposed "freedom" to write, sing and paint most anything we want blunts the edge. Co-ops what we do. Whereas the arts in nations that legally suppress expression . . . have an edge we've long since lost. It's actually "subversive" to speak out when your life might be in the balance. It's a revolutionary act in and of itself when it may well mean one's imprisonment.

    In America, it probably just means no marketing support and subsequent poor sales. Though, after 9/11, new lines in the sand were drawn and we don't even know all the repercussions of that for artists . . .

    Anyway, looking forward to more from your series.

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  7. Money changes everything.

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