fuck off. Ya gotta love it.

And here I thought rd was a class blog.

"You'd better get this straight. Wise up before it's too late." -- Sister Sledge

Oh, I do, I do.

Admittedly, though, there's a history of antagonism between me and some of them.

>>defensiveness and anger over Obama campaign strategy

Yes, indeed, if a candidate's campaign strategy is to demonize the opposition and to promote hate of an entire class of people, I will be defensive and angry and will refuse to support that candidate, no matter which party he suppposedly belongs to but never mentions.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

I'd prefer to see an analytical takedown of the Liebowitz article -- based on material (if any) from the Confluence's comments or responses, rather than a meta takedown of Confluence personalities and moderation practices. I know from personal experience how hard that is. I mean, you can't write "somewhat troll-ish comments" and then not expect to be treated like a troll.

And what Anglachel writes is this:

Ignore [mandos's] moronic bout of CDS in the last paragraph (and the pathetic excuse he offers to try to claim it’s not really CDS) and concentrate on the meat of the post itself where he offers a well-reasoned rebuttal to the claims of the Confluence post.

"Disagreement"? Possibly.

Mandos, you need to make up your mind about whether you want to contribute to a blog feud, or supply analytical tools to take down a pernicious argument. If I thought the PUMA people were monolithic, or operatives, or Tier Two-types, I wouldn't worry, because whatever such types say is instrumental, and they're not open to persuasion. That's not the case with PUMA, IMNSHO; we've thrashed this out many times.

De-front-paged.

UPDATE Racism, both as a personal failing and a systemic problem, is almost impossible to talk about without complete devolution into concern trolling on all sides (not that the OFB have made that any easier with false charges of racism; in fact, they've made it worse, and we can expect a lot more of it when Obama's elected, since why would they change what's worked). So mixing in (a) CDS, (b) snark, (c) serious analytical work, and (d) blog feuding about meta crapola like comment deletion seems like a silly way to take on the issue, if indeed taking on the issue is the point of the post.

Since the message is so very mixed, I wouldn't blame anybody who took the post personally -- obscuring the analytical work. Hardly the desired outcome, eh?

UPDATE Two statements that are not the same:

1. You're using talking points devised by Conservatives that reinforce systemic racism

2. You're a racist.

#1 is what I mean by not being "value neutral." Your talking point is not you, mkay? #2 is what the OFB did, over and over again, in the primaries, to me personally, among many others.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Anglachel puts it well, and Mando's "admittedly snarky" last paragraph is central, not peripheral:

CDS fractures the Left's attempts to combat the Movement Conservative assault on civil rights and social justice. The rightwing counts on the willingness of the Village and the Blogger Boyz to never resist an occasion to take a cheap swipe, just as Mandos did in his otherwise excellent post. BTD asked during the campaign if it was more important to the Obamacans to purge the Clintons from the party than to win the election. I think the answer is that they are more interested in purging what the Clintons culturally represent to them than to have an effective political party. They are viscerally opposed to what they think is present in these people (and the nature of the attack on Palin echoes the historic attacks on the Clintons from Left and Right) in much the same way as a significant portion of the Republican party cannot see a candidate like Obama – or Deval Patrick or Barbara Jordan or John Lewis or Carol Mosley Braun or Douglas Wilder or Stephanie Tubbs Jones, or for that matter Condi Rice or Colin Powell – without having their racism kick into overdrive. The CDS driven Left does not appear to notice that the attempt to quarantine all the “bad” effects of political decisions by the Democrats as somehow attributable to the actions of these two specific political actors and their never-quite-firmly-defined circle of unindicted co-conspirators (Obama himself having been one of that group in the not so distant past, along with Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Lieberman, all of the current Congressional leadership at one point or another, and quite a number of public intellectuals and their families, including Paul Krugman’s son) does not and cannot defend the Democrats from rightwing claims that they are failing, they are lying, they cannot be trusted to protect the nation, etc. nor does it encourage more progressive behavior from those who are alleged to be combating the deleterious effects of the 90s, as we are seeing in the FISA vote, the current rip-off fiasco, the abandonment of UHC, and so forth.

Thus we end up with the leading lights of Left Blogistan solemnly agreeing that the president who fought tooth and nail to secure vital loans to help create long-term wealth in minority communities is nothing but a racist, another faction of the Democrats grabbing everything the Republican ratfuckers are shoving their way to tar the people, policies and plans that the Clintons have promoted and defended against rightwing attacks in some misguided belief that this will hurt Obama with voters instead of reinforce the Obamacan claims that the Clintons are just racists like their Bunker and Bubba supporters, while the Right merrily spreads the lie that Bill and the Democrats created the mortgage meltdown by setting up a scam for the undeserving minorities and poor to steal money and houses through the GSEs and CRA.

This is the full anatomy of the rightwing dog whistles of the last half century: Stirring up visceral reactions with distortions of cultural stereotypes and ordinary politics, mixed well with personal smears and attributing the worst possible motives to unobjectionable acts, in order to divide opposition and mobilize resentment in the service of dismantling the legacy of the New Deal.

And it just keeps working.

Yeppers.

People need to understand that Conservative analytical tools are not value neutral. They are designed to destroy "progressive"* policies. If those tools are used for tactical purposes, they end up having bad strategic consequences.

NOTE * Whatever "progressive" means these days, given how the Obama bloggers destroyed the brand with misogyny.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

[ ] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Snark is my MO. I was a very early Sadlynosian commenter, back when Seb still lived in Canada and before Brad and Gavin were front-paged or perhaps even readers. I cut my internet teeth on snark.

I put a lot of effort into this post, and it says what I want it to say in the way I wanted to say it. Since the discussion started from something I said, I thought I'd be afforded the opportunity to respond where it would reasonably be reached from the original discussion (ie, not my puny personal blog).

I spent considerable time last night crafting it, because I didn't actually think it would be taken down. If I had known it was going to be taken down, I wouldn't have bothered. I reasonably believed that it would not be taken down...because its a response to responses to something I originally wrote here which was reasonably well-received.

I wouldn't have minded distancing edits and appendices, or an admonition not to bring down the snark hammer in the future (and hence not waste my time). Yes, it's Lambert's blog, and I'm whining about a privilege he affords regular readers. But given that he's afforded it, I made some reasonable inferences.

Since I wasn't allowed to post a front-page post with a link directing people to respond on my blog rather than here, here at least is a link to where I would prefer further discussion to continue.