I love Daily Kos, but too many of us are now full-on talking out of our asses. A sizable proportion of diaries are just knee-jerk responses to whatever latest nonsense or madness is being propounded by the other side, unwittingly increasing its platform and media penetration the more we wrestle with it, and still more of us are responding to that stupid shit by defensively insisting on things that are not and never have been credibly in question. Who does that, if they're the least bit confident? You seem to have no faith in yourselves or in the inherent value and strength of the truth, fighting shadow puppets and acting like you're losing because they always evade your grasp. Republicans do not matter. What they say doesn't matter. What the media says doesn't matter. They are purely reactive. Now decide whether they are going to react to you, or whether you and they both are going to react to someone else - probably not the sort of people you want setting the agenda.
I look at the list of diaries and see a vast wasteland. If I were a paid employee of the Republican National Committee and it was my job to create futile, demoralizing, self-pitying, reactionary filler in the guise of liberal commentary, I would write things very similar to what I see being posted here. Some psychiatric patient in Bumfuck, Alabama has an epiphany that 2 + 2 = 5, and gets some people to agree with him because Teh Librul Jooish Gubmint says it's 4. They hold a rally in a trailer park, which 20 people attend, and Fox News reports it as a march on Washington involving 40 billion protesters. The rest of the media, being far more rational, splits the difference and says it's more like 100 million, and expounds endlessly on the "raging controversy" that is "spreading across America" about the true sum of 2 and 2.
You know that 2 + 2 = 4, and you know that every sane person knows it. You know that most of the people saying otherwise know it. You know that anyone weak-minded enough, with psychological foundations so flimsy they could be brought to doubt the sum of 2 and 2 is utterly inconsequential, and that fighting for their hearts and minds - what little of either they have - is tantamount to writing words in water. But there is something in you that doubts your own sanity and moral worth - some pinprick of humility that too easily balloons into insecurity and allows people incapable of responsible behavior to have a vote in reality. Somehow people you would not allow into your home; people too disorderly to even have a conversation with on the street; become the central audience of your writing.
Out come the defensive diaries insisting that "Yes, 2 + 2 DOES = 4!!!" "I am a proud supporter of arithmetic!" "Join the anti-innumeracy rally!!!" Suddenly the drunken, muttering transient from Bumfuck, Alabama is setting your agenda, and the louder and longer you argue, the more powerless you feel. The air of Dark Age decay surrounds you everywhere you look, the walls are closing in, the inmates have taken over the asylum, and you're left bitterly retreating into self-important apocalypticism. You and Davy Crockett, fighting the Alamo. Except it's all bullshit: It's you and only you who is doing this. All of it. You can't find anything to talk about without being fed a topic by people who are beneath you, or anything to do without having something to fight, so this is what happens. Rather than a source of political definition, you simply become another media mirror endlessly reflecting random impulses as they arise from background noise and soulless propaganda that would be totally impotent without your cooperation.
I won't lie, it makes me sick to my stomach - fills me with disgust and loathing. Why are you constantly seeking the approval, and begging the agreement of people who don't even deserve to be acknowledged by you? Why are you demanding fairness from blind forces of idiocy that never have and never will understand, let alone respect anything you know or value? Is it simply fear of the violence and chaos of the other side that makes you a liberal, and nothing deeper? Nothing substantive and full-hearted, that can never be touched by people who don't share it?
I've had to say this on more than one occasion, and I hope some day it's more broadly appreciated: People who are not on board with the most fundamental conception of right and wrong, lacking the most basic respect for the truth DO NOT MATTER - they are as politically and intellectually irrelevant as wild animals and inclement weather. And the rest are not protected from those people by treating their ravings as objects of unbounded attention - they are protected by your being something better, and reflecting that which you are rather than a rejection of things that crawl out from under rocks. If you don't know who you are, and can't see the power of the positive things whose absence defines the right-wing mentality, you will simply become their food, and everything you do will serve their purposes.
The only argument against a destructive madness is to dismiss and ostracize it wherever it occurs and whomever promotes it. Any argument with madness is an argument for madness. So tell me, where the hell are you? Where are the liberals, when our main preoccupation becomes "debunking" the bottomless well of noise and nonsense? Where does a mind go that thinks it can fill an abyss by staring into it? The best waste treatment plant is a garden, not a vat of toxic chemicals. I don't care what you're against, and neither does anyone else. I don't even care what I'm against - I bore myself when I start talking like the shit that's now dominating the discussion here. And for fuck's sake, don't interpret that as a suggestion to simply rephrase all your negative attitudes as flimsy, lukewarm support for their direct opposites. "I support a country where __ isn't __ ." No.
A lot of times I run out of ideas, or procastinate developing them. I don't know how to proceed, or I feel stagnant, or for whatever reason the machinery of creation just isn't operating very efficiently. And while my record on this is not perfect, most of the time I know exactly how to deal with that problem: I STFU until something worth saying percolates to the surface. And it always does, because I'm alive and I know what truth is. I have no interest in negations of lies, and obsequious apologies of basic human decency by weak people who don't believe they're right. Stop fucking boring me.