So the logic is that allowing comments from kooks means you’re actively using these kooks; and not allowing comments from kooks means you’re engaging in censorship. That’s some bizarre logic, but as we all know, the most important principle of logic is ex Republico quodlibet.

That said, I guess I see your point… Just like in any other large group online or in the world, we’re going to have our share of those with less desirable views on one issue or another…

Also, it tends to be a place where those on the left are going to air our interpolitical differences for all to see… (Any party that claims Kucinich & Lieberman as members is bound to have some interparty strife… …and that doesn’t even include Greens like me, with still another take the issues…)

It has to make for bad PR, from the standpoint of Kos being held up as representing the liberal/progressive political community. The fact is though, we are that messy, and I’m not so certain that’s a bad thing…

Whatever a comment says, the only person who deserves the credit/recrimination & blame is the person who posted it. If someone wants to make a case that offensive comments don’t always get the response (that recrimination & blame) that they should from the rest of the community—including the blogmaster, that’s one thing. But to blame the owner for the content of their comment section is kinda silly, in my humble…
————————————“cherry-picked for a few nuts”

Mmm… nuts & cherries…

Quite right—if a bridge collapses, you’re supposed to blame Ted Kennedy.

All snark aside, note the employment of the familiar rightwing tactic of ruling whole continents of sensible argument pre-emptively out-of-bounds. We needed to invest in infrastructure, but the president thought it was more important to cut taxes for his wealthy supporters, and spend every cent we could borrow for futile military adventurism. But don’t blame the president if bridges collapse—that’s just nuts.

Except when you do moderate your comments section, it’s called censorship.

Unless it’s Republicans who do (or don’t) moderate, in which case, IOKIYAR!

Riefenstahl! Civility! Fairness! Balance! Decency! Idiotarian! Greenpiss! Bring on the talking points!

1. Daily Kos claims to be a grass roots / community movement.
2. Here are some strange people in the Daily Kos movement.
3. Kos is not directly responsible for the strange people but does find them useful.

That is of course what you would think. Here we had a subsversive meta-level commentary about power and control in the blogosphere via a “seemingly inadvertent” tag lossage attack, but of course The Man has the controls and in the end The Man gets to do do what he wants. Are you guys scared of your own commenters or what?

[faux bluster off] Your welcome, and wipe out the prior failed attempt at comment 4 while you are at it. In 4, I just flat out forgot that angle-brackets would be interpreted as tags, in the next one, it looked like I had corrected it via using & lt ; and gt, and it previewed OK in IE7, but had different lossage when posted it (no italicization). Didn’t have a chance to look at it in Firefox, I suspect that those who saw everything italicized were using Firefox – and I half think it was the & lt ; right before an “I” that somehow got interpreted as an italics tag without a close – but am taking pains to not test it in this post. Apologies

And back on topic. Details of Barnett’s post aside, (or John’s characterization of it), I do think that O’Reilly’s attack on DailyKos and the whole resulting scrutiny on the nature of blogs and online communities will come to be viewed as a watershed event on the path to the mainstreaming of Internet discourse. I do at least hope that in the end it will result in a diminished ability for fatuous liars and propagandists to propogate BS like we saw with the MoveOn/Hitler ad accusation that I mention above.

What he is attacking is not the blog, but the blog’s constituency. He wrongly extrapolates from the rather banal comments of the few to the general character of those commenting. I thought of Iraq—I live in Minneapolis— when I saw the bridge video: it looks like it was bombed.

Oddly, he seems to be conceding that right is the same, despite his ludicrously small ‘sliver’ claim when he concludes: “But those who pine for a right wing entity to match the Daily Kos and Moveon.org might want to be careful what they wish for.”