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....