In pursuit of the truth, what road do you take?

This was what brought me to DU in the first place. There was little truth being exposed after the Supreme Court put George w Bush into power. Lies and propaganda and cover-ups ruled the day.

That was a time when DUer's were referred to as the "ten-percenters". We were the 10 percent disagreeing with Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But we endured. We were proven to be right much more often than we were wrong.

DU, in its early days, was a place for honest and frank discussions. Dishonest discussions were quickly discovered and thrown out on their asses. There was much less leniency for questionable conservative positions, which we had already heard until our stomachs had turned. Today, there seems to be more tolerance for these suspect positions.

There are many places to get stories and facts but they are seldom deeply explored for the truth. Most sites, like HuffingtonPost for example, have discussion boards, but they move so quickly and they are open to every partisan position, which, in the end, it balances out to nothing said and nothing heard. They do little to get to the truth.

This has been the area where DU has excelled. DUer's take the information from places like the NYTimes, the HuffingtonPost, DailyKos, and many, many others and discuss them down to a gnat's ass. In the end, DUers usually come to a consensus. Bullshit is exposed as well as the truth. It was necessary, in the beginning, to block out the conservative propaganda which had taken over our entire country. We had to work around those that kept infiltrating the site with the same tired bullshit.

Times have changed. We now have people like Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman, Ed Shultz, Dylan Ratigan, and several other progressive voices that we did not have back then. We also now have the first black President. We elected a large Democratic majority to the House and Senate. We have made great progress in many ways. However, the pursuit of the truth continues.

We see now the influence of money on politicians and politics in general. It crosses Party lines and runs counter to the interests of the people. This is a truth that we must address. In the end, the truth is more important than any Party affiliation. Let's not be deterred by slick counter-arguments that serve no purpose other than to confuse folks. A good example is the argument to let suspected terrorists buy guns but deny them every other right that applies to common citizenry.

Many people in Washington and nationwide know about the DemocraticUnderground. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. Ask Robert Byrd. Ask Helen Thomas. Ask Barbara Boxer. They may not want to talk about the "underground" but they know about it. We could read about the oil spill, the bomber in Times Square, the stock market collapse, etc, and we would know what we have read. However, only by deep discussion and exploration of the facts can the truth be known. That is where DU has excelled. The pursuit continues.


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the pursuit of truth gets trumped by allegiance to party;

Particularly that which you want to be true.

-- no matter where it leads me. I stopped being the pure partisan I was for 20+ yaers and it is the best thing I ever did. Now I only care about who is doing the right thing by the American people, and exposing those who undermine us.

I think, with the situation we have now with a Dem President/Congress we have to be even more vigilant to find - and more importantly hear -- the Truth. God knows during the Clinton years I was a fierce partisan who defended him til the day he left office. Looking back, it was a huge mistake on my part. Blind loyalty doesn't do anyone or the political process any good.

After 9+ years here I have learned it is imperative we question everything being sold us, no matter who is doing the selling. That has become much harder to do here in the last year+, but I am thankful it still goes on.

unless they did so by giving pizza to dissenters, but there has not been too much of that. At least there is a wide range of dissent allowed on most issues.

For just one example, there was never a DU consensus on Hillary vs. Obama. In the beginning, Edwards ruled the roost, although he was never more than 60% with a solid 10% going to Kucinich, 20% to Hillary and 10% to Obama (to make some WAGs)

What I saw for a number of years was that DU would seem to collectively latch onto the media's issue du jour. If Israel was in the news, we would have hundreds of threads about that. If immigration was in the news, we would have hundreds of threads about that. And so on. We seemed to follow the TV, and there was never a consensus. Usually there was a split with both sides hurling invective at each other and making accusations of bad faith at the other side.

Things seem to be quieter now. We have not had a big issue war for a while. Either some of the partisans are gone or we are all kinda worn out and cannot find an issue that both inspires and divides us.

Of course, intra-party disputes and races were simply matters of personal preference, not having much to do with the pursuit of the truth.

You are right that DU might "latch onto the media's issue du jour". However, when they do latch onto the issue, they explore it further than anyone else that I know or have read, mostly because they are not diverted by right-wing arguments, in my opinion. We can thank the Admins and the Moderators for that.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=258x2788

I cannot find a good example, (in a whole four tries), but that OP sums up a couple of points

1. First, there were three camps on that issue - thus, no consensus
2. rather than leading to more understanding, "the threads are becoming less respectful"

This may seem like I am saying that "DU sucks" but really I am just trying to look at the reality, and in my experience the idea that we all vigorously hammered out our differences and discovered the truth, or came to a consensus, does not fit the reality.

I sorta think we need the rightwing arguments too, because we need to be able to answer them, and often we cannot, except with invective or mockery. Here's the way Somerby makes the point. http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh050410.shtml

"As is often the case on such matters, the liberal view about this new law is the minority view. In a rational world, this would present an obvious question: How can liberals persuade the public that the law really does go too far? Just a guess: It probably doesn’t help to suggest that support for the law must stem from bigotry or racial animus."

We may discover a truth, but more important that knowing a truth, is being able to convince a majority of that truth in order to shift the country in a positive direction.

from where we were 8-10 years ago. However, we are coming to the realization that the people we thought agreed with our viewpoint do not necessarily agree with us.

Maybe we won't. I am hoping we won't, but the conventional wisdom right now is that we will. Also, if there is a DU consensus, it often seems to be around Kucinich/Wellstone rather than Obama/Reid/Pelosi. Most of the country does not share our most progressive views.

We got what we wanted, as far as a huge Democratic Congress and Senate, and even a Democratic President. On top of that, we elected the first African-American President. Things looked pretty good until Bush and the Banks decided to shit on the floor on their way out. And the hungry bastards that they are, they left a big mess to clean up...

Bush spent his entire two terms trying to spend as much as humanly possible and putting it on the credit card so that the "liberals" would not have money to spend on their "social programs". I'm not so sure that the bailout at the end of his term was not planned for similar reasons? It sure would put a damper on any social spending or so they thought. That is why Obama had to put off healthcare going into effect until about 2014, at least, most of it. That is why Repubs can't wait to get back into power. So they can spend us into oblivion again. After all, look how much Obama cut the military and weakened us around the world? We will need to spend a lot of money to be "safe" again, like we were under Bush and Cheney.

We have come a long way. I cannot imagine where we would be if we had not discussed the issues on DU and actually marched, wrote letters, sent flowers, and did everything we could think to do as citizens to get the attention of Democrats in Washington. I think we made a difference. We were the voice of the Democratic Party when most of the Democrats in Washington were bowing to Bush on issues we thought would never be compromised: free speech zones, torture by our government, eavesdropping on millions of Americans, the scare of terrorism, illegal wars, lies and crimes. We spoke out on those as loudly as we could, going back to January 21st, 2001. We had volunteers looking to join the movement. And it was a movement at that time. Probably one of the first Internet movements of the time?

Dude, step away from the rightwing talking point. Other than the wars and the Tarp at the very end, Bush did not go on a huge spending spree. We have deficits because he went on a huge tax cutting spree. The top 400 taxpayers got average tax cuts of $45 million in 2006 alone. The top 1% got $550 billion in tax cuts in just the four years of 2003-2006 (and probably as much in the years 2007-2010 for which I do not yet have data).

He spent about a trillion dollars on a Medicare program without paying for it. Then handed out billions of dollars in Iraq and they had no idea where it went. What do you mean?? Bush did not go on a huge spending spree? He spent like a maniac and cut taxes at the same time while fighting two wars??

in ten years that is only $100 billion a year.

I base my view on facts. Table 457 here http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/federal_govt_finances_employment/federal_budget--receipts_outlays_and_debt.html

Spending grew from 18.5% of GDP in 2000 to 21% of GDP in 2008, but 21% is not totally out of line. In 1980, Government spending was 21.7% of GDP and over 22% for much of the 1980s, so, again, 21% is not out of line. Spending in constant dollars only grew by 32.5% from 2000 to 2008. It only grew by 10.75% during the Clinton years, but those were an abberation. In the 1960s, government spending grew by 57% and in the 1970s it grew by 41.9%. So for the Bush years, spending grew by an average annual rate of 3.61% and during the 1970s spending grew by an average annual rate of 3.8%.

So, contrary to Republican and conservative squawking about spending, I do not think spending growth was out of line during the Bush administration. It's not the cause of the deficits. The cause is found in tax receipts that fell from 20% of GDP in 2000 to 16.3% in 2004 and only climbed to 17.7% by 2008. Complaining about spending is not only not accurate, imo, but it plays into their hands, especially since Obama has had to spend quite a bit.

with $400 billion more added in the future. I guess we have just about reached that trillion dollar mark by now?

But it doesn't matter. They have already put it on the credit card. It is already part of our debt.

I agree with you that tax receipts fell dramatically during the Bush years and that is a big part of the problem - probably several trillion added to our debt simply because of the tax cuts?

Bush spent a lot of money on the military complex. I am not complaining about spending in particular - only the lies about others spending like maniacs. But when you spend, you have to be willing to raise taxes also. There is no proof that putting the debt on the credit card is better than raising taxes to pay for it. Possibly, the opposite could be proved?

Memory issues?

How many Clinton supporters are still here, besides me?

It was the beginning of the current purge-happy era.

This is the most gross kind of revisionist history.

McCamy Taylor is also still here, to name another vocal Clinton supporter. Seemed to me that Kurt and Hunter was also a Clinton supporter. Other than that, I really do not remember, but I think there are still quite a few around (perhaps Bluebear and others in the GLBT community who never forgave Obama for McClurkin). That's perhaps just blind optimism on my part or faith in the DU mods. If there was a purge I would blame it on people who could not let go of the primary rancor and were still lobbing missiles at Obama even going in to the general election.

I also said that a conensus might be arrived at by giving the most vocal dissenters a pizza, of the Tombstone variety.

I'm not suggesting I always do it well, but that is always the goal.

We long ago passed the point where we were cleaning house of conservative trolls. Now we're purging our most provocative thinkers, leaving only those who are the most benign and willing to surrender to groupthink.

I could point to many phenomena which illustrate my point
- unrec
- the proliferation of polls
- grave dancing threads (and the locking of threads which suggest the purge is inappropriate)
- prior restraint on the kinds of interest groups allowed (no men's forum allowed - "we know what they'll talk about")
- outright intimidation and threats of banning.
- "my ignore list is bigger than yours"

Part of this is predictable, I suppose. Democratic "Underground" undoubtedly changes when the Democratic party controls government, but I don't think that evolution required this degree of... Lord of the Flies.

The quality of conversation has declined, but not because we used to, in some utopian past, all think alike. It's because we've forgotten how to disagree with our neighbors and instead learned to burn their houses down, then dance around the blaze.

It has been a process of elimination. Arguments evolve over time.

Perhaps you are correct in that the quality of conversation has declined? It just seems to me that we had less inconsistent arguments in the past. There was more intelligence involved in the discussions, perhaps not utopian, but more rational.

I do not disagree with many of your points.

I think the "unrec" has created an atmosphere of distrust that is not healthy for discussion. And some trolls use it as a personal vendetta against those with whom they disagree without having to say why they disagree. I agree also that there is a "groupthink" that is very prevalent.

My hope is that DU remains relevant as I think it has been in the past. A discussion board is just a discussion board unless it can generate actions or provoke thoughts of change.

The influence of money in politics? Now THAT'S what I'm talking about! And I don't care if it IS one of "our own"...... corruption is corruption, plain and simple. This issue badly needs to be discussed openly, frankly and honestly.

others want information. Even if the truth is ugly and it differs from what we "want" to hear.

You can either come here just to reinforce your beliefs …or you can come here and learn something.

UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that most are here just for the former.

The thing that gets to me most here lately is that even "asking the questions" gets you labeled a "troll". I used to love to play "devil's advocate" - but I don't DARE do it on DU 'cause I don't think some people really understand what "playing the devil's advocate" means.