Daily Kos Doesn’t Like Free Speech
Written by YellowJacket on February 3rd, 2006Sometimes I like to take a gander at the Kossites for a good laugh, or to get my blood boiling.. sometimes for both. Some posts and comments are so void of intellect they aren’t worth more than a glance, but today I saw one that I just had to reply to. The post was about spending more money on Iraq, and this particular comment was a parody of Bush on Social Security. Here’s what the commenter said:
Ya see (none / 1)
we have to get rid o’ Social Security. Not because we want to. Just cuz we have to make a sacrifice to protect our freedoms and our liber-muh-ties. There’s no money, people. When you don’t have money, you can’t have programs. We have to prioritize. And right now, Freedom and democracy are the highest priorities. But, don’t worry. We’ll just get rid of it for a bit. In the meantime, try one of these personal, private account thingamajigs.
- George W Bush, speaking to the people, January 2007
This was too good to pass up. I couldn’t resist. It’s like driving by a car wreck and not looking out the window - you just have to. So I replied (yes, I have a Kos username, but only to reply to such asinine comments and stir up the pot):
Get Rid of SS? (none / 0)
That’s funny, I haven’t heard Bush advocationg getting rid of Social Security. In fact, if you noticed it was the Democrats who (shamefully) cheered at the State of the Union for obstructing reform that would help rectify the black hole that Social Security is going into.
You don’t get it, do you? The Social Security “Trust Fund” isn’t there. It’s been raided by politicians of both parties for years, and is nothing more than IOU’s.
I don’t know about you, but if I see a fund that is supposed to be coming back to me, and politicians are having a field day spending that moeny on other programs, a private account with my own control over it sounds much more preferable.
But of course Bush and the bloodthirsty Republicans are advocating it, so it can’t be a good idea. Right.
I left the site, looked around a few other blogs and news sources as is my typical routine, then came back to this post to see if any Krazies had responded with dripping hatred to my comment. That’s when I noticed something strange. My comment had dissappeared. I’m not making this up - the people who run DailyKos deleted my comment because they didn’t agree with it. Unbelievable, huh? A site that constantly accuses the media of being biased (which it is.. but not against the Left as they claim in between curse words), that is part of an emerging blog community dedicated to free speech, removed my comment because they didn’t like it.
I was expecting to be flamed, to have to endure the unfortunate wrath of Kossites hurling epithets at me (still cursing every other word) while screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs. But why do that when it’s so much easier to erase a dissenting opinion?
I re-posted the comment. We’ll see if it gets noticed and removed again.
UPDATE: My comment was removed again. See Comments for a lefty’s justification of the removal in the name of convenience, and his lame attack on Bush’s Social Security reform.
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i’m not making this up. daily kos is a self-policing community, in that a system in place indentifies “trusted users” who are given the opportunity of rating a post with “0″ or troll (below the stand 1-4 all users are given).
If a post has an average rating of below 1 after two votes, it disappears (only other trusted users can see it) but it is not deleted. your post is still there and visible to a large portion of the community.
i think we would both agree this is a reasonable mechanism at a website with over 70,000 registered users. do you think markos would sit around watching out for trolls?
(i came here to read this article for free. as a college democrat who worked closely with college republicans, i thought that was a great story and the comments were funny too.
thx google!
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Entry Filed under:
As a response to your comment, the United States is legally obliged (per its constitution) to honor any outstanding obligation or, specifically, “entitlement” as is the case with Social Security.
You do realize that our currency is nothing more than IOU as Nixon removed the gold standard. anyhow, broader criticism of bush’s privitization plan includes taking a guarantee and tying it to the market. that kind of artificial stimulus into the market would really just benefit the rich, and besides, why gamble with social security when there are plenty of options available to everyone to invest towards retirement.
also, speaking of pillaging social security, our president just asked for how many hundred billion more to pay for iraq in 2006?
borrow and spend republicans. good grief. let’s just hope china, south korea and japan don’t call in their loans.
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So basically, you’re saying that if the mob doesn’t like what you say then your speech is limited. Limited to only “trusted” users, who by all means, are trusted because they’ve been spouting off the “correct” statements for a good amount of time.
This is censorship. Only in this case you don’t have one person doing the policing, you have thousands. There may be rules, but apparently they aren’t followed very well. That can be expected from spreading out responsibility so thin.
I can go on about secret police, the hive mind mentality, even warn everyone of dumb people in large groups, but that won’t change anything. Your post got sent to Free Speech Siberia, courtesy of the NKVD.
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First of all, I’m going to address your blatant censorship. What in the world is an open forum such as a blog good for if you simply stifle anybody who disagrees with you? It’s amazing that you can justify that. If blogs aren’t for debate, what are they for? We constantly have debates on this blog regarding a full spectrum of issues. Sometimes it’s amongst ourselves (conservatives), and sometimes between us and liberals who visit. I fail to see why a bunch of same-minded people just repeating the same sentiment over and over again, with no debate, is productive. It isn’t. Now i know why you are so self-confident despite the fact that believe it or not, the average American doesn’t agree with your doomsday analysis - it’s because you simply ignore the other side. If you don’t have the gonads to have a debate on a (supposedly) open forum, then you probably shouldn’t even be opening your mouth.
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Don’t Look Too Closely Behind the Curtain in the Land of KOS
Daily KOS has devolved into a totalitarian propaganda tool of the most extreme elements of political correctness. It pains me to say this because I have always been an unabashed liberal on most social issues and moderate to conservative in fiscal matters. But, regrettably, Daily KOS has become nothing more than a carefully regulated and engineered tool of arrogant armchair political activists with a hive mentality. Although, on KOS, unlike the Borg of Star Trek fame, you will not be assimilated, rather, your viewpoint will simply be sent to the cyber paper-shredder and then you will be silenced into submission if your opinions do not appease the winged-monkeys guarding the castle.
I contacted the technical support personnel at KOS recently about how someone (person or persons unknown) hacked into my diary and made alterations to it. What began with irrelevant personal attacks and an ample use of obscenities in the comment section of my diary on KOS soon escalated into a feeding frenzy for political piranhas. After I reprimanded some of the flamers, suddenly changes were made to the comment section and soon comments by me and others just simply disappeared in my own diary entries. Also, the “tags” section kept changing repeatedly each time I re-inserted the reference tags relevant to my latest essay. At first I thought it was just a glitch, just a “ghost in the machine” if you will or, then, more alarmingly, perhaps cyber gremlins doing their worst. Then I realized it was another, far worst, kind of monster, it was the serial killer of free expression which all people who value liberty have shrunk from in fear throughout time immemorial, it was the Posse Comitatus of political correctness on a murder spree.
Like I said, this all started after I had a problem recently with “troll swarms” on the Daily KOS. These professional flamers disguise themselves as point-of-view regulators and sycophants for, and perhaps even sent from, the Wizard of KOS. It is hard to say how many other contributors they have attacked as the bodies just simply disappear into the vast swamp of cyberspace — deleted and never seen or heard from again. Also, I noticed a number of these “troll patrols” do not have diaries of their own - which leads me to suspect that many may actually be from Technical Support themselves. I mention this because after I brought the “flamers” to the attention of Technical Support, I was locked out of my own diary. I’ve finally came to the realization, and without even the courtesy of receiving a response to my concerns, that the KOSsacks in the Land of KOS, apparently drunk with power after the last election, really haven’t created a “brave, new unfiltered outlet for real news and free speech”, rather they have just perpetrated a sham on the corporate news media and on the public. What KOS has become, whatever its original intentions, is simply an juvenile, chauvinistic internet Frat House with a tribalistic, twisted sense of self-importance and no real concept of how the market place of ideas really supposed to conduct itself.
So, to all of you of the right-wing persuasion (my brother flaps his feathers on that side too) take heart because the Daily KOSsack and their bloggist-sphere’s version of Pravda does not discriminated when it comes to right or left viewpoints in general, no, rather it only discrimination when the resident hand-picked “enforcers” (who have “Trustee” status similar to guards in a concentrations camp) do not agree with a particular point of view (right or left) that it considers too far off the tightly controlled bounders of their political reservation in the Land of KOS. To think, I used to believe that it was just radical right-wing Republicans who were goose-steppers, but now I’ve lately come to the realization that radical left-wing Democrats are just as fanatical and uncompromising in their behavior. For this reason, I am on my way to joining the ranks of the independent voters — you know, the ones who actually decide elections and then watch people on the extreme fringes on both sides take credit for victory - depending on the outcome of course.
As I said, I am proud now to call myself an unaligned, independent voter in America. And for that I can rejoice, because I am (in the words of the late, great, Dr. Martin Luther King: “Free at last! Free at last! Great god almighty, free at last“ !!). So, thanks Daily KOS for opening my eyes to the threat of how dangerous mob-mentality on both ends of the political spectrum can truly be, and thanks also for exposing yourself as one of its most revealing, living embodiments of what that threat to freedom and unregulated discourse represents.
~ Bud Evans