Every day, just like other Daily Kos administrators, I receive e-mails from people saying that this or that person in a candidate Diary is a Troll who is abusing the ratings, attacking a fellow commenter or Diarist, posting garbage, lying, destroying the community. When I look into the situation, many times I discover that the e-mailer is at least as guilty as the person s/he is complaining about.
I could be judicial about the whole thing and trace the truth of each instance and rule on the claims of he-called-me-a-name-first-did-not-did-too. But, you know, I've got a life, and playground monitor is just not on my résumé.
I do, however, sometimes wish I had a lightning-bolt button on my keyboard to deliver a charge through the innertubes that would power-surge the motherboard of selected Diarists and commenters, as well as spark their fingertips. Zap! Zap! But I'd need Michael Mukasey's permission for that, and he and I aren't talking.
Let me be perfectly clear. I am not objecting to passionate support for the wonderful wonderfulness of Candidate X or Candidate Y. Nor about passionate dissection of the awful awfulness of Candidate Y or Candidate X. Nor about speculation that X or Y is the best choice to defeat whatever bit of debris the GOP finally nominates to run against the Democrat in the general election.
Feistiness doesn't bother me in the least. Pointing out hypocrisy, or how a voting record doesn't match rhetoric, or how money from this or that source could make Candidate X or Candidate Y beholden to interests that stand in the way of progressive reform are fair game in my view. Digging out perceived problems, including the hollowness or shallowness or murkiness of X's or Y's policy views is a good thing. After all, as someone who is perpetually in the internal opposition of the Democratic Party, and who sees politics as far more than elections and legislative initiatives, I don't accept January 20, 2009, as the end of the line. To get real reform, progressives are going to have to nudge, press, push or shove the new Democratic President, whoever s/he turns out to be. So I'm hardly averse to critiquing the candidates for that job now - as long as the critiques aren't based on lies and tendentious truncations of what Candidate Y or Candidate X actually said or did or proposes to do.
Sewage is another matter. Especially sewage spewed with an our-shit-don't-stink behavioral ethic. I don't know how big or small a percentage of the candidate Diaries (and comments) constitutes sewage, but it seems to be growing, and the stinkers no longer confine themselves to their own turf. I also don't know and don't care whether the supporters of Candidate X or Candidate Y are the worst offenders. Plenty of people in both camps - and in the camps of Candidate Z and others before now - have engaged in the spew.
In my opinion, I speak only for myself, not for any other administrator, fixing this is a matter of community moderation. Shutting off the shit spigot could happen, and quickly, if a dozen supporters of Candidate X decided to start hiding the comments and publicly critiquing the Diaries of other supporters of Candidate X who spout sewage, abuse ratings, lie, distort and otherwise behave - as some have said - as if this were a junior high most-popular-student election instead of one of world-shaking consequences.
Also needed are a dozen supporters of Candidate Y to do the same to other supporters of Candidate Y whose behavior reeks.
Perhaps, after some confidence-building, the two dozen can work together, just as we'll have to do after the Denver Convention.
More top-down moderation could, of course, be applied. We administrators could go absolutely wild deleting and banning. But once we got started, some of us might learn to like it so much that we wouldn't know when to stop. Self-moderation - bottom-up, fairly done - is the progressive answer to treating sewage.