When I started putting this diary together, at around 10:30am PDT, the Recommended Diaries list was led by this pair of diaries:
It doesn't take a genius to observe that the two display different viewpoints. They also attract different audiences. The question I asked myself was how different?
The answer, I'd suggest, is VERY DIFFERENT.
My methodology is simple -- I looked at the long list of Kossacks whose Recommendations moved the two diaries to the top of the Rec List, and searched for usernames that appeared on both of those lists.
At the time I made the comparison, blackwaterdog's diary had earned exactly 300 Recommendations. That Korean Guy had earned somewhat fewer Recommendations, a still-impressive 248. No wonder they're at the top of the heap!
And how many Kossacks saw fit to Recommend both blackwaterdog's paean and That Korean Guy's screed? Exactly 18 of them.
Thus, only 6.0% of those Kossacks who Recommended blackwaterdog also Recommended That Korean Guy. Only 7.3% of those Kossacks who Recommended That Korean Guy also Recommended blackwaterdog. An even better way to state it, I think, is the following:
Of the 530 Kossacks who chose to Recommend at least one of these diaries, only 3.4% of them saw fit to Recommend both.
I'm not really surprised that this divide exists here on dKos. I'm not sure whether the divide is more extreme than the ones we've seen previously -- candidate wars, HCR, pie fights, and such. It would, perhaps, be interesting to do a similar comparison of highly Recommended/diametrically opposed diaries from other times and other controversies.
It's crystal-clear that dKos is currently in a highly fractionated state. From the evidence I've presented here, it's also quite obvious that there is at present little in the way of common ground between the positions articulated by blackwaterdog and That Korean Guy.
Will we eventually do less of this talking-past and begin to do more talking-with? That's the way it's worked with our past controversies. That's how I hope it will work with this one.
In the immortal words of the Captain in Cool Hand Luke, played of course by the great Strother Martin,
"What we have here is a failure to communicate."