I joined dailyKos exactly 10 years ago.
I have, per the Cromwellian phrasing, sat here far too long for any good that I have been doing, and it's time to move on.
Before shuffling off this orange coil, so as to get on with the business of living and working and accomplishing, I think perhaps a bit of a recap is warranted.
Ten days after joining (in those days, there was a "cooling off period" required before newbies could post), my first comment was a minor FYI item:
yes, i know it was a joke, (4.00)
but as i understand it, museums are just about the most popular cultural destinations in america, whether measured in total visits per annum, or measured by the fraction of the pop that makes at least one museum trip per year.
and that's my first-ever contribution to dk.
Later that day, my
second comment argued that the nomination of John Kerry had been both repugnant and unwise -- incredibly, some folks were suggesting he run again in 2008.
Speaking of mistakes (0+ / 0-)
Has Kerry ever admitted that voting for the Patriot Act was a cowardly, craven, wrong thing to do?
He made a liar of me, because I swore I would never vote for anyone, for any office, who had voted for that travesty; but in 2004, the stakes were so high there was no room to stand on principle.
Every Senator (but one) in the chamber at that time, Republican and Democrat alike, disqualified himself or herself from consideration for public office, by dint of having put fear for one's own personal political future ahead of the integrity of the Constitution and the needs of the nation. Or, to be more charitable, for abandoning the responsibilities of the office in a panicky rush to do something. Anything. Cowards. Fools. Panicky fraidy cats, all of them.
Sorry Senator Kohl, I'll be looking for an alternative in '06. I'd rather vote for a libertarian than for you.
In any event, Senators don't become President unless they are running against another Senator, or unless they are John F. Kennedy. So Kerry should abandon fantasies of becoming the President.
Somewhat ironically, my recent diary on electability repudiates those last two sentences. My statement was (and is) statistically accurate, but as I have since argued, we have too few samples for meaningful statistical analysis of the patterns of successful and unsuccessful presidential campaigns, and arguing that any candidate is unelectable is either stupid or evil, and usually both.
Reviewing my first 50 comments, I can't say that I've learned a hell of a lot in the intervening decade, other than the dKos convention for indefinitely nesting threaded responses.
One last time, then, over, through, and past the delicate, tantalizing O'Keefean motif, into the warm sweet heart of the matter ...
It's depressing to see how little progress we've made. My recent series of diaries, "Boring, Stupid, Wrong", highlighted three (among many) arguments that I've encountered so often on dKos that I've simply lost patience with them. One of those is the chauvinist bunk that makes even otherwise sensible, liberalish people believe the tribalist myth that America has some sort of unique cultural advantage that will allow us to outcompete the world in matters of technology, science, and industry.
I've just discovered that I started railing about this doofusism almost immediately. Here's my earliest comment on such idiocy, from 9 years, 10 months, and 29 days ago:
meso-economics of free trade (0+ / 0-)
capital moves freely. labor cannot.
capital protects itself on an international scale (ref. US Marine Corps, 1805 - 2005). labor cannot.
in an industrialized world, the major proportion of modern economic value is created, not from natural resources, but by human labor.
humans have the same potential talents and abilities everywhere you go.
so, the only stable "natural advantage" one nation can have over another, vis a vis its economic production, is the willingness of its population to work harder for less compensation.
in terms of economic value, free trade is pretty much pointless for all but the smallest nations -- which should join together into coalitions of small nations, excluding large ones, in order to gain the necessary economic value. Brazil has more than enough people to write all of the computer software that Brazil will ever need. The fact that Brazil spends, i expect, gazillions of dollars on microsoft software from the us is silly.
by UntimelyRippd on Mon Dec 05, 2005 at 10:53:13 AM PST
I also see that several of my 28th through 41st comments argued that Hillary Clinton was not progressive -- at least, not in any sense that had any value to me. (Raise your hand -- and stifle your rising gorge -- if you remembered that
she voted for that abominable flag anti-desecration law. I'd forgotten that one!)
So what can I say? plus ca change. Ten years, and twenty thousand comments later, I'm arguing the same arguments, often against the same bozos, more often against bozos-come-lately. It isn't very gratifying. Should anyone pine for my contributions, there's an easy solution: go to my profile, click to view my comments, and then edit the URL to change from page 1 of my comments to page whatever. As far as I can tell, it won't matter a whole lot which page -- the ideas are mostly the same from one page to the next.
Swenny how, in the last few weeks I've been "wrapping it up" with a series of diaries about some of the things I've been ranting about for the last several years. They are the almost last word -- the last word being, the tip jar of this diary. For the sake of reference:
Boring, Stupid, Wrong: American Exceptionalism addressed the stupidity and wrongness of people who believe that American can "win" the global economic competition.
Boring, Stupid, Wrong: MMT addressed the excruciating tedium of trying to explain to the advocates of MMT ... anything.
Boring, Stupid, Wrong: Electability addressed the deeply stupid and unforgivably anti-democractic insistence by certain people that one or another candidate for office is unelectable.
and earlier today, I concluded with a last-minute semi-coherent dash to the finish line, meaning, of course, that there are many things that have been left un-said_again_for_the_hundredth_time: Boring, Stupid, Wrong: Epistemology
What, then, is left to say, but this:
Despair thy charm,
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely Ripp'd