If true, I'm very saddened by that idea. I'd really like to believe that people who agree with the mission statement on DU could accept a loss without being uncivil.

Many of us did so in 2008, and the ones that weren't.. well, they were rightly criticized IMHO.

And I do mean that in the positive way, not a "nah nah" way.

know I will be here regardless, working for the Nominee, because I can't accept the consequences of not doing so. I had enough of Republican rule in my 20s when I was helping protest the Iraq War, luckily missing getting arrested on April 7, 2003 when NYC decided to illegally suppress a legal protest. I spent that day handling out pamphlets to the arrestees so they knew what their charges meant.

Others, particularly in California, experienced far worse that day.

If they force this, they will hear from me as loudly and clearly as the Republicans heard from the tea party. A sleeping giant has been awakened.

Which is necessary, not to suppress Democrats, but to deal with RW shills. The Primary isn't over and that time obviously hasn't come yet. But it will. And if you still refuse to at least be civil during that time, your home isn't likely to be DU then.

That's why I was trying to sincerely wish you well if that's the choice you make. I hope it's not, but you are the only one in control of your destiny.

wisely. This is not a year for establishment politics, evidenced on both sides. To fly in the face of it is not only foolish, but the results will be predictable. (And I have made my predictions)

So yeah, it's a year for establishment politics. How can the party run against itself? "Give us four more years, but not like those last 8. I'll be different this time"

.. move further to the left.

I understand you are passionate and opinionated, as I am. My passion leads me to advocate fiercely for the nominee we will have. In my opinion, it's going to be Hillary this year. It may be passion out of fear, but my experiences have led me to have that view and passion.

But I hardly want to use Trump's success as an example of dislike of politics as usual, because it seems more like his support is about racism, nationalism, and a desire for facism. It seems awfully unfair to Bernie's cause, supporters, and beliefs to compare the two.

For heaven's sake, you make it sound like you have magic powers that allow you to singlehandedly bring about an apocalypse if Bernie doesn't get elected. I think it's applaudable that you're passionate about your candidate but there's nothing saying we have to be so unbelievably nasty. A little ribbing humor can be fun when we're all trying to jockey for our candidate but the depth of viciousness here is over the top on both sides. All Moriah seems to be asking not for unity but just for civility. Is this so difficult to hope for?

and are already fed up with the infighting.


This seems a little suspect.

.... it used to be considered against the Community Standards to accuse anyone of being a sock or shill in messages.

If you are concerned that this poster, as new and jumping in quickly, may not be as new as they claim (particularly with the CTR announcement), it might be more effective to send a message to Admin or MIR. They're pretty good at sniffing out shills, socks, and others who aren't actually newbies.

I believe the list of current MIR members is hdre:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10135783.

Does any one know if there's a unified account a message can be sent to in order to hit all of MIR at once?

DD says something you don't like and so you don't trust her motives. You suspect her of something. Because she is new.

And please don't pull the newbies-don't-count meme. I've been here since 2001 (check my profile), not that it should matter.

And I think DD's position is right on.

When one relative short-timer gets indignant with another short-timer for being "new."



Just sayin'.

Agree completely, btw...

That poster sounds bitter. That is a lot of emotion for such a short stay, dontcha think?

He used to be a hero on DU. How times have changed.

I think he was one of our best presidents.

find living under President Cruz a living hell, not about them.

Got it

now that the TTP and the Corporate State are party planks.

to participate in the election.

Two people will be running for that office, that is all, TWO.

Because in adult world voting Green, while personally satisfying, is not addressing the issue and being part of the process.

sigh

She will be the nominee. Personally, I think a GOP win carries more "taint" ...a stench in fact especially what it would mean to so many people Trans,women, anti-fracking, another war,economy in free fall, social security, medicaid and Medicare...the courts...the list goes on and on...oh no if you help the GOP, the taint will remain permanent on your very soul.

But even the press releases show the funding to encourage Hillary supporters to respond to negative attacks is being directed to FB and Twitter, not DU.

Accusing -term posters of such behavior in messages, however, is just as uncivil as the Hillary supporters who have dismissed Bernie supporters as the sexist term "Bernie Bros", though.

Accusing Clinton supporters on DU of being paid trolls. Another conspiracy ad nauseum and another personal attack.

Can't hide it

Jury was 4-3 to leave it.

didn't work.
And what makes anyone on this forum think most of us that support HRC
are getting paid for posting our support?
HILLARY IF YOUR WATCHING I WANT YOUR MONEY,
PLEASE CONTACT. It will counterbalance the money I gave you already!!!!

geez.

.... that I sure could use the money, being on disability and all.

But just like I couldn't bring myself to continue doing Tarot readings after someone asked me to find their missing kid vs give a little advice with their love life, there are just some jobs I don't have the wthics to do.

Though if I could talk dirty without blushing, I would have been okay working on NiteFlirt.

... the answer is no, it is no longer possible.

Once the Admins relinquished all responsibility for what gets posted here, and handed it over to "juries" who have allowed the most vile things to be posted, the most vitriolic statements to be made, any chance that there would be a "kiss and make up" stage went out the window - along with the TOS.

Had posters been warned up-front to cool their heads before spewing vitriol at those who supported a different candidate, things would have gone very differently. But instead they were encouraged to be as obnoxious as possible, because if they were on the "right side", no jury would "convict' them.

The vitriol was allowed to be spewed without restraint, and now it's far too late for anyone to "unsee" what they've seen posted here. Long-time posters that were once long-time friends now see each other as mortal enemies. Had "civility" been a priority here, the posts that turned friends into enemies would never have been permitted to be posted in the first instance, no less adjudicated and left to stand by "juries" - who were told by the Admins that they weren't expected to enforce the TOS; IOW, do whatever the fuck you want.

There used to be rules here - and they were good rules. But no one adheres to them anymore, and the Admins don't enforce them. They kept people from saying things that could get them banned - the threat of which served as a reminder to cool-off before posting a personal attack, to think twice before calling someone who disagreed with you a paid shill.

In real life, there WILL be unity in the Democratic Party. There WILL be unity in standing behind our nominee. There WILL be civility - nay, comraderie - between HRC supporters and BS supporters who join forces to defeat the GOP - no hesitation, no questions asked about previous preferences of candidate, no purity tests administered, no qualms about taking up the good fight together.

But that is "real life". What happens here on DU will be another story - and it is a story of no consequence in real life.

... that it's far too late. The vitriol was allowed - it can't be undone, unspoken, taken back, erased from memory.

...jury service would help a lot. It's pretty vague right now -- what one person may call over the top, another person might think hilarious snark.

Remember that under the old moderation system, people still complained. No system will be perfect.

But more guidelines would be helpful. Like, a reminder that civility and ad-hominem don't go well together. That stalking people across threads isn't civil, either. Like that DU is supposed to be a community of Democrats, so no matterr how civil someone might be when saying they want Jeb, that DU's mission is to elect Dems or better. Like that while some things are sexist but not so sexist to merit waasting a jury's time, there are some lines.

Better guidance really would help both jurors and alerters.

Everything you said here is so spot on. What justice comes from a jury system so rigged as to balance against only those people supporting a specific candidate. There were certainly short term fixes they could have applied to make this work better.

... your post gets hidden. That's why.

I guess it will all be over soon when their candidate loses. I'm sure some will try to go scorched Earth. We'll see how that turns out.

DU is DU - and real life is real life.

And, it would seem, never the twain shall meet - at least not any time soon.

One civilized poster, one who has been stirring it for ages and a newbie who is appalled by this, with mere hours of being here.


How Hillaryious.

... even though I sincerely doubt it.

I have a couple extra minutes to gamble away (I ask this question only knowing i will be getting more rhetoric, but with fourteen years here i have already proven i can outlast the liars)

Apparently some folks haven't been paying attention to the last 9+ months of nastiness being dished out by the metric ton from the "majority" here.

What folks seem to be seeing NOW is some long overdue pushback in response to the endless insults, put downs, and just downright hatefulness some of us have been subjected to for MONTHS on end.

I'm dumbfounded by the calls for civility at this point, I mean where the hell have they been???

Perfect summation, Nance.

This so-called "nastiness" has been something HRC supporters have faced for months. That needs to be acknowledged on here before any unity can happen.

I agree with Nance: it will happen IRL.

Now you gotta vote for my candidate or you'll be an even bigger loser, loser.



Politics as practiced on the DU...

If not, let me assure you, once again, that I'm trying to advocate for those Bernie supporters who have not yet had a chance to vote and feel disenfranchised by calls for Bernie to resign now. There were Hillary supporters who felt the same way in 2008, when the math was looking bad for Clinton but voting wasn't over and people were calling for her resignation because McCain had clinched the GOP nomination and many wished to get on with the General.

I do wish, for similar reasons, that we could get the jump on the Republicans. But I do feel a great deal of empathy with those who want their voices heard. Hence why I am glad to see Bernie suggest again publicly that his intent is to try to win a majority of pledged delegates, not try to overturn the voters at thr Convention.

If you were not being sarcastic, however, this is yet another example of the incivility that isn't helpful whoever the Nominee is.

Not really even sarcasm since some posters actually say things very much like that, closer to irony.

If you worry about doing the right thing you're more likely to win than if you worry about beating the other guy.

I just really do miss being able to talk and disagree (and even have some beautiful snark), but not see continuous ad-hominem when, if we're members of this forum, we should theoretically be on the same side in the end.

and everything to do with people bein' jerks.

I support your message, here.

That'd require the site owners to give enough shits to start tossing out bans.

Things were bad before the staff decided to get rid of timeout periods. Now though? No consequences, at all, for people baiting and attacking others. No consequences, at all, for someone who has had 10 or more hides for completely inappropriate personal attacks against other members.

I'm really considering canceling my star membership sub. The staff no longer care about keeping this site civil, so I'm finding it hard to justify giving them money.

I am grateful that the formum still existed for me when I didn't have the money to donate to it, even if seeing Google ads for my Republican congressman (gotta love cookies) drove me batty.

The DU staff should be aggressive in blocks on the attack posts.

Is potential loss of $$$ the reason? That would be my best guess.

hill aint gonna win over the real lefties with the im not trump message. gotta do better

I really do support IRV and vigorous third parties. I think that even if for the first few elections we may still have the two major parties in office, but when they see how many people chose more left candidates like Greens as their first and Dems as their second (and far more likely, fiscal conservatives choosing the Libertarian party for their first choice over the social wars promulgated by the GOP), both parties will have to move to the left in order to actually deal with General Elections where people can vote their conscience instead of merely fear.

That's the real revolution that will change our government, in my opinion.

I'll quit when she fires David Brock. When her surrogates stop trying to "disqualify" Bernie. And when MSNBC's Maddow decides to finally report fairly and quit the gossip after each interview.

I'll also quit when Clinton supporters start answering with issues and not personal attacks. I'm getting pretty good at it myself because trying logic with some of these people drives you insane.

I really wish that as Democrats, both supporters and surrogates could have focused on real issues instead of trying to highlight differences that weren't much in comparison to the differences in the General between our party and the GOP. I was happy that, at least at first, Priorities USA Action devoted far more ads to criticizing Republicans and then just saying they liked Hillary. I wish that they had continued to hold onto their war chest for the General. (Also, on another note, if a Hillary supporter is going to post something from that website and suggest it's an unbiased source, at least until we have a declared nominee, it's NOT unbiased.)

I do still firmly disagree with the suggestions by Bernie's campaign manager that the same type of joint fundraising agreements used in 2008 and 2012 were unethical and wrong, because under the current rules downticket Dems will be hopelessly outraised if *someone* doesn't start raising money for them. I also disagreed with his assertion that Bernie's plan was to attempt to overturn the will of the people.

I'm happy that Bernie, even without publicly embarrassing his campaign manager for getting passionate, has disavowed any such plan.

But regardless of how I may feel about the behavior of some of both candidate's supporters, I really do try my best to give people the benefit of the doubt instead of judging the candidate by actions of people are passionate but not official paid members of the campaign who Bernie (edit: and Hillary, she's not immune either)has given permission to speak for him/her. And I try to give Bernie/Hillary the benefit of the doubt when even those people cross lines.

You just cant have it both ways. You either support it by supporting her or you don't.

They also will be personally responsible for what ever happens to the party in November should the queen get nominated.

You can't have it both ways. Votes have consequences. If their votes ruin my life dont' expect a pass.

I disagree with your conclusions about Hillary's character. I don't think a person has to be poor to care about the poor. I don't think playing by the rules as they are written is hypocrisy, but good sense since the other side has no scruples at all about raising money from anyone who will give it.

Especially when the vast majority of (if you include PACs) of the alleged oligarchal money is from people like George Soros and Stephen Spielberg, instead of AIG like Jeb, or the many, MANY SuperPacs with Republican donors who have put their own ads up to cause dissention among Democrats.

But it's my opinion, and just as you are entitled to your own opinions, that one happens to be mine.

I wish you well.

Not helpful at all.

The RW vocabulary does not include "civility".

... type of attacks will not be part of the game.

I just wish that people could agree to disagree without having to attack each other.

Guess I smoked too much of my piece pipe, though.

A well-known RW tactic is to sew dissension among their opponents, by posing as disaffected, disenfranchised & disappointed "progressives" when they're really nothing of the sort. So, Clinton is attacked as the front-runner, as are mainstream Democrats and the Democratic Party.

The fact that Sanders supporters not only can't recognize this - even when Karl Rove's signature on these attacks is barely dry - and pick them up and repeat them instead, shows Sanders supporters are neither informed enough nor prepared to be Democrats.

Again, civility is not in the RW vocabulary. And that's the source Sanders supporters goes to for their talking points.

Feelings and opinions, those weren't denied to me.

But if I started behaving badly, that was my own fault for not using the self-control I was the only one responsible for.

Blaming the other side (and this isn't just to your post, but others too) for how I chose to behave wasn't an excuse.

Since when is it "civil" to call an accomplished, successful professional woman a whore? Do you think the Sanders folks should be held accountable for doing that?

... that we, each, are responsible for our reactions to things other people say or do.

The behavior of others may infuriate us, but we're only able to change one thing -- how WE act.

It's not projection when the exact same comments with the exact same wording coming from the Trump & his supporters on one side, and Sanders & his supporters on the other, it's an observation that there must be some sort of collusion between them.

But not because I think it will ever lead to any sort of unity. That's simply not on the table: the divide between the camps is too great, too fundamental, for any reconciliation at this point. Regardless of who ends up the nominee, the party will never be the same.

"It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s and because of both president and Mrs. Reagan — in particular Mrs. Reagan — we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it, nobody wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something I really appreciate with her very effective low-key advocacy. It penetrated the public conscience and people began to say, hey, we have to do something about this too."

Ignorance must not be rewarded, apathy and bigotry can not be endorsed.

Upthread, you and NanceGreggs join in being unhappy with the jury system. The fact is, however, that alleged bias in the jury system doesn't matter now that timeouts are gone. Clinton supporters with double-digit hide counts on their Transparency pages are free to keep insulting us, and are using that freedom. Meanwhile, there are longtime members who've made enormous contributions to the forum, but who are now perma-banned because of ONE post that was interpreted as advocating doing something other than voting for Clinton if she's the nominee.

The admins are sending a message about how (un)important civility is, compared with the surpassing importance of falling in line behind Hillary Clinton.

I'm assuming some people will nit-pick the way you worded your post, it's what people do here.

I'm not going to do that.

Excellent points, thank you.

DU posters need to be far more civil than many are now.

Civility would greatly benefit the entire DU community.

I read your OP title and was like, Yes! Agree! Then I read your first paragraph and quit reading.

More civility would help, coming from both sides.

... cleared up any suggestion that I tolerated the actions of said Hillary supporters.

But sorry if I wasn't as elegant as I wush.

I've spent a lot of times on non-partisan and sometimes even hostile web forums (I used to play the America's Army FPS game in the early-mid 2000's, so imagine what the handful of us liberals had to endure on a military-themed discussion board at the heights of Bush's 9/11 hysterics ). It's just getting rather difficult to see the same sort of stuff conservatives toss at you, coming from other Democrats. Someone even cited a Jerome Corsi...Jerome motherfucking Corsi, the slime who created the Swiftboat Vets for Truth...piece here the other day.

The fact that Hillary may not be quite to the left on all issues as Bernie is doesn't make her the Neocon Antichrist.

There are a lot of posters here on DU who are doing nothing more than trying to cause problems, and they do so on a daily basis. They are on both sides of the isle, and the play their stupid games simply to try and divide the board, and they hope they can get enough people to listen to their BS and drive down voting come November. Once the nomination is decided, they will go back to their bridges and stay there till the next election, at least most of them will, some will stay and continue their goal of destroy DU. We have to realize the problem and stop it so we can unite and make sure we don't end up with a Trump or Cruz in the WH.

and replace those with, what Armstead calls, a 'commitment to the greater good'. It should be in all of our interests, because it certainly is Sanders' commitment. Those who believe in Sanders (as many of us do) should respect that commitment.

nt

I am civil and respectful but many here at DU do not even try.

A great proportion of supporters of Hillary Clinton are uncivil and disrespectful posters.

They continue to attack and mock and refuse to discourse on substance.

Why? It works in the favor of their candidate and also reflects the character of their candidate though a mild and weak sauce of Hillary Clinton's character issues.

The disrespect coming from Clinton supporters towards her opposition is off the charts.

I will likely vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election but I will not subsequently support Clinton.

Clinton lacks the character to be POTUS or CIC but there are no alternatives offered save a miracle.

I do not intend to leave the Democratic Party as many state because I have been a registered and voting Democrat since 1972 when aged into the vote and was a Democrat in spirit since 1968 when 15 and first politicized.

At some point the neo-liberals are going to crash and burn and Hillary Clinton may well be the catalyst.

When people post reasonable things in a civil and reasoned manner, I generally respond likewise, and keep disagreements non-personal.

When people post insulting bullshit and extreme snark, I respond likewise.

But of course I've got my own glass house, so sometimes, I'll post insulting snark at times, when I need to vent. But at least I chastise my inner troll when I do.

If so, sorry, but I can't help you.

You can't have this both ways.

I can't count the number of anti-Hillary crap posted here ...most of it from right -wing sources too. And the attacks on Hillary supporters and the blackmail...vote for Bernie even if he lost or we will make sure you lose the general...sorry. Hillary supporters have behaved quite well in my opinion. Bernie supporters not so much.

And agree that incivility is bad, so try not to engage in it ourselves?

That's really all I'm asking.

Human beings are moral agents who make choices.
people choose to be civil.
or not.