A reminder of what DailyKos is

I’m a bit busy this weekend so I’m just going to repost something I wrote in a comment on Corrente.  But I don’t want anyone to think I spend a lot of time obsessing about DailyKos because I don’t.  It didn’t take me long to figure out four years ago what DailyKos was all about and I have written about it before.  I haven’t been back there for years and I can go months without even thinking about the place.  I don’t yearn to be reinstated.  In fact, quite the contrary for a variety of reasons not least of which is that I don’t want to be associated with what I consider to be an online high control group.

So, here is my reminder of what DailyKos is from Lambert’s post on Allegre’s Writer’s Strike:

Slightly off topic, but following up on the response I had to Hugh above, let’s not kid ourselves about what DailyKos is. It is an enormous focus group. Every now and then a topic will get a lot of attention on the board and that’s the way the operatives and psychometricians figure out what makes lefty types tick. They refine it. They get to know what your trigger words are. They know how to push your buttons so that your emotions circumvent your rational mind. That’s why the racist meme was so effective in 2008. It’s the worst thing you could call a liberal. We react viscerally to that accusation. It’s only the very sane among us who don’t flinch from it and even those of us who know we aren’t racist spend every waking second defending ourselves. If you try to point out what they sneaky ones are up to, you get banned.

DailyKos also love bombs. If you express the preferred thoughts, you get mojo, you get recommended, you become popular. People like you. They want to hang out with you and be your friend. You become a trusted user. You get status. The whole place is rigged to make sure you stay, that you are rewarded for being cooperative and expressing the meme of the day and that they threat of losing your entire online community is real and frightening. No one wants to be exiled. It extends to other blogs as well. I’m sure that Digby is on a short leash as is anyone who signs on to the advertising arm of Kos.

It’s easier to see how this works if you grew up in a religious cult so I had an edge and my shock and horror of being banished from DailyKos lasted about 30 seconds. Then I laughed and started my own blog. I may be a tiny speck of dust in the Oort belt but I am free to say what I like.

But in general, if you hang out in DailyKos or affiliated “blessed” blogs, you will start to short circuit your thought processes. You will start to use buzzwords to explain politically what’s going on and that’s just where they want you. You don’t think about what “neoliberalism” or DLC really mean or how they may have evolved or how to grade the degree to which individuals adhere to a certain philosophy. You are trained to associate a word with a person, the connotation of that word to those persons and that you will be rewarded with good feelings if you do it right and bad feelings if you do it wrong. I realize that neoliberalism means a great deal to some people but I never could understand why. It never did make a lick of sense that so much emphasis is placed on this one word when people rarely fit into black and white categories. But you can be sure that lefty attitudes about the DLC and corporations and Iran and “war hawk” and other buzzwords come from careful seed planting and harvesting on places like DailyKos.

I would avoid any blog that uses a rating system.