GDP is an island

Before last night I had not realized how completely General Discussion: Presidential has turned itself into a DU dungeon--an isolated forum for people with atypical views.

Jefferson Dem posted about how more than 30% of DUers say they won't vote for Obama in 2012, citing a DU poll from General Discussion.

I looked at the poll and thought it was an impossible result caused by self-selective participation in a thread that was really about Afghanistan, not about ones future voting plans. So I posted a poll in GDP that showed what I expected -- solid support for Obama, minimal interest in a primary challenge.

Jefferson Dem was right and I was wrong. Cali noted that my poll would be completely different in GD and she was right. I had not realized that one would get opposite results by posting a poll in GD vs. GDP. Different, sure, but not opposite!

(It is not a call-out to say someone was right, BTW.)

A high vote-count poll in GD yesterday had Dennis Kucinich crushing the President in a hypothetical 2012 primary match-up. I don't have all that much use for President Obama but even I would vote for him without hesitation in a primary contest with Dennis Kucinich!

I was, and am stunned. Because I post mostly in GDP because of its lack of sordid true-crime and Susan Boyle posts I had no idea how strong the disatisfaction had gotten... on DU. This is about DU, not whether DU is representative of the real world. Of course DU is wildly unrepresentative of the nation.

(I am not linking to the poll because after hundreds of votes it was locked as "unhelpful" and I don't know if it is bad to link to a locked post.)

So, to those here who view their online role as maintaining and increasing support for or loyalty to President Obama within DU, it is possible that elements of the effort are not working and may even be counter-productive.

Rather than pretending that most DU criticism of the administration is the work of mal-intended interlopers it might be better to accept that a lot of people who donated, canvased, agitated and voted for President Obama are pissed off in stereo and it isn't just because they are whiny children, commie rats, stoned hippies, un-serious narcissists or whatever.

It's like marijuana policy... saying that pot smokers eat babies is a useful technique if nobody has ever met a pot smoker or smoked pot. But when pot reaches a certain point of popularity then wedge techniques meant to dehumanize the pot-smoking minority flip and become a driver of public acceptance of pot because once people know from their own experience that pot doesn't make you eat babies then the credibility of the whole anti-pot position collapses making future less-dramatic arguments ineffective.

Some of us on the left are still underground.

Cheerleaders? It's impossible to have an opinion contrary to yours without being insulted?

"We're NOT going anywhere"...

Ok, if you want to achieve true grammatical correctness, it's "We're not going anywhere, so whine away." (delete the period, add a comma and a space).

See, English is easy!

:P

his supporters in every post you type.

you have 7 years left of it.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Nice try.

You do realize that in the "real world" 99% of people don't take Kucinich seriously, right?

Remind me -- what were his primary popular vote numbers? How many delegates did he get?

While GD-P is certainly not in the mainstream of the real world, it's closer to the real world that GD by far.

GDP is the least underground part of DU. People out there, in the real world, are absolutely enthralled by Obama's shiny white smile and know little about the issues and policy. Some segment of them can be found right in GDP, giving it a demographic much closer to the general population.

This country is run by cliques. Kucinich as president would be completely marginalized. He'd be the loneliest man in Washington. In order for a complete outsider to take over the government, he would have to rouse the mob to a fever pitch. Kucinich couldn't run Cleveland. He may be short, but the resemblance to Napoleon Buonaparte ends there.

Much much closer representation of what one will find in the real world.

What I find very interesting in this post is your strong endorsement of 9/11 conspiracies, while today you support Afghanistan escalation precisely because of 9/11.

Duplicity in the name of political expedience is really a horrible vice.


HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sat Mar-04-06 02:22 PM
Response to Original message

16. A plea to DUers now that Dennis said this: We are not crazy pod people!

Now that a respected and beloved Democratic leader has endorsed the outline of LIHOP, can DUers who don't believe LIHOP or MIHOP, at least treat the possibility as something over which reasonable people can disagree? I realize that most of the debate properly will go on in the 9/11 Forum, but non-crazy postings in GD I hope will no longer elicit the sneers from "official conspiracy theory" (ie 9/11 Commission incompetence theory) believers.

If you don't accept LIHOP, fine. But people who believe in LIHOP, like Dennis, or MIHOP, do not necessarily believe in flying holograms, pods under planes, hijacked planes' passengers being offloaded in Cleveland, passengers from hijacked planes spending forged Italian Lira on the Austrian border, or that these conspiracies occur because we are governed by reptilian lizards from another planet.

I said that Kooch was beloved, not that I loved the Kooch. So I suppose I'm guilty of arguing from authority.

That said, the Kooch proved with respect to his stance on 9/11 that he is exactly what I have argued he is -- a blowhard who gets absolutely nothing accomplished, and seems not to want to get anything accomplished.

He used to complain that the Bush administration was stonewalling on 9/11 issues. Now that there is a new administration, he has dropped any interest in getting to the bottom of the obviously complex issues surrounding those attacks

So on the issues over which I referred to the Kooch, he proves once again that he is a charlatan, liar, and completely ineffective -- on purpose -- and an accomplice of right wing republicans.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x575821#575867


HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Sat Mar-04-06 02:10 PM
Response to Original message


9. If Dennis is right, and this is proven then Dennis for President because .

If Dennis is right, then DC's political class is going to be swept clean, and there won't be hardly anyone left except Dennis!
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Amazing how people are allowed to change their minds about Obama, but not about the Kooch -- even though the Kooch has been a much bigger fraud and disappointment than any other Democratic politician.

Do you realize how stupid your "gotcha" reads in the context of the anti-Obama meltdown DU is going through? The fact that I liked the Kooch makes my criticism even more telling because many of the people who are anti-Obama here were always anti-Obama and their claims of "disappointment" ring hollow. By contrast, facts and analysis have brought me to the inevitable realization that the Kooch is a kook, fraud, and con man who has never accomplished anything and now has a "Democratic" voting record that rivals Joe Lieberman's.

Also, Obama never claimed his mind was directed by aliens in UFOs.

The fact that you keep saying that you used to like Kooch and now you don't is very funny.) And no, you are not displaying any intellectual consistency here. :)

:thumbsup:

I hear all of the time from DUers that I know in RL. The place is over-populated with people who seem to enjoy snarkiness for its own sake. They relish every insult they hurl at other DUers, and because they hurl so many, the forum becomes rather self-selected and practically impossible to moderate with consistency. You either have people with thick skin, or people who do nothing but test how thick everyone else's skin is.

And the intellectual dishonesty is frankly so rampant that the signal to noise ratio is non-existant. So few DUers in GDP are willing to be honest about anything.....it's all attack attack attack, no matter how shaky the underpinnings of such attacks are. It has opened my eyes to exactly how our community resembles that of FR. At least the freepers are stupid...what is our excuse for lack of intellectual honesty?

It doesn't matter that the tactic is counter-productive to Obama being re-elected...all that matters is that those perceived as "others" get their day ruined....and preferably run off of the site. It is the mentality of a Jr. High bully, and it is unbecoming of people whose average age is well over 40. The griefers have now numbered so high in GDP that I find myself going back to the ignore button again and again. I am just tired of reading the equivalent of monkeys throwing shit on the wall and making people smell it.

This latest round is really counter-productive because people are being brow-beaten for being the same leftie they have always been on this site. And I promise you that those brow-beating the left today will blame the same left if/when the Democrats lose power, never once examining why the vast left that seemed so prevalent in the Bush years suddenly dried up and stayed home on election day. They will just chalk it up to betrayal since the left is "expected" to vote for the Democrat no matter how corporate, how anti-left, how corrupt, or how disingenuous.

On EDIT. Sorry ignored, cannot hear you. If you want to talk, then you should not have hurled so many insults that I hit the button on you. And no, I don't always announce that someone is taking up too much of my bandwidth with rhetorical chaff.

Oh, and in GD, too..in fact all over the board.

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Incredible! This was a scientific poll, though, right? Actually, DU polls tend to be worth the electrons with which they are written.

An island populated mostly with those who zealously defend the president, no matter what he does.

GD is a much more accurate view of how progressives view the president and his policies.

.... and only because I appreciate the fact your opinions are well informed and you offer them in a manner that speaks to your respect for everyone here that I'm even replying to this.

But you HAVE to see it goes both ways. There is way too much bashing on BOTH sides. I could just as easily say,

"So, to those here who view their online role as criticizing and decreasing support for or loyalty to President Obama's policies within DU, it is possible that elements of the effort are not working and may even be counter-productive.

Rather than pretending that most support of the President is the work of Koolaid drunk cheerleaders, it might be better to accept that a lot of people who donated, canvased, agitated and voted for President Obama are legitimately proud and satisfied with what he's done thus far and it isn't just because they are groupies, commie rats, closet Bush fans, chicken hawks or whatever."

Comprende? ;)

I disagree with the Kucinich majority, so I am not arguing they are right and GDP is wrong.

The "cheerleaders" (sorry, but I don't know a better identifying term that everyone would understand) conduct themselves from a presumption of being the numerically overwhelming norm. Hence the post.

It's not about whether both sides are nasty and dehumanize opposition. Of course they do. I do sometimes... not always proud of it, but I do.

It is about how GDP has become an echo chamber. The vociferous "cheerleaders" have successfully driven the DU middle out of GDP until there are only a few "haters" (fair is fair) who post in GDP, just to mess with the cheerleaders.

The composition of GDP is then taken as the natural environment, with the assumption that one can dismiss any naysayer as a troll or lunatic.

But it is an illusion... the opinion composition of GDP which was once pretty representative has become skewed.

I write for self-expression, mostly. I don't believe I am shaping the world by ranting on the internet. But some folks do think they are fighting a PR war for hearts and minds, and my message is that just because you can drive the disagreeable out of an internet forum doesn't mean the vanished.

The question is, is one's goal to get people with negative views to stop posting in GDP, or to change their minds? If the former, then everything's cool. If the later, any appearance that GDP-think is making average DUers more supportive of the President seems to be an illusion.

... I'd argue that the "cheerleaders" are no more driving the cynics away to GD than the cynics are driving the "cheerleaders" to the Barack Obama group.

People are free to come and go as they please.

And I would humbly suggest that the overwhelming reason why people post here is ....... to put off doing work at their desk job. :)

I am feeling quite guilty already :)

.... that I cant surf the 'net when I'm at work. ;)

Now back to the point - it seems to me that GDP may be more of a sanctuary than a launching pad to "take over" DU.

You lost me there - your assumption showed a certain arrogance that, although not surprising based on your posting habits, made your analysis null-and-void. Don't ASSume.

My comments are only about DU.

The real-world view of Obama among Dems is somewhere between the extremes of "Obama: Love him or shut up" and "I want Kucinich," but closer to the former. Obama remains popular with Dems and Kucinich is a fringe figure most places other than DU.

If you are questioning my assumption that GD is more representative of DU than GDP is, that's almost tautological.... GD is a VASTLY larger forum with a VASTLY larger number of participants. Of course it is more representative of DU.

That doesn't mean it's right, but GD is California to GDP's Iowa.

I will simply state that I want to post where Dems with views that are more representative of the real world post - that may be GDP on certain topics, GD on others Remember, GD encompasses non-political themes on everything from vanity posts to health posts, WalMart post, scatological humor posts and toons etc.

GD also has a vastly larger number of gate crashers that want to post in the forum with the most volume - doesn't mean they aren't also trolls. Size does not define quality. I bet the number of bannings that occurs in GD is 100x what happens in GDP.

in GDP that was also posted in GD. The GD post got 12 recs and mine got up to 8 recs before (and it's often shoot the messenger with my posts) mine was knocked down to 1 rec. Anyway, it defies your logic that a pro-Obama piece is better received in GD than GDP - unless it's more about the messenger than the message - eh?

I don't know.

Certainly personalities are a bigger deal in GDP--smaller, more intimate group.

What's Obama's approval rating among Dems in the country? Pretty good I would assume. Probably over 70%. Although I don't have time to look for the hard numbers.

This is a website composed of mostly Dems, some conservative, some liberal and some moderate.

I doubt Obama has a very high approval rating in GD.

GD is the Island and GDP is the mainstream.

Are completely missing the point, aren't they?

This place is filled with disingenuous people - it really sucks that they have the gall to say they are the "mainstream" of the Democratic party. My ass.

Now, I see why I could get few responses on GD when I posted things like SFRC on Afghanistan or other mostly John Kerry related issues. There were times where there was not even a possible stretch to defend putting them on GD-P, where there would usually be intelligent discussion.

I think that most of us have spent most of their time on GD-P or LBN or in my case, the John Kerry group. (There was a time, especially before he became VP, that the Biden people would join us to comment on SFRC hearings.)

It is clear that the Kuchinich/Nader/Grayson people do need a forum - especially as they might not have many who agree with them in real life, but it is clear that they represent only a small fraction of all Democrats. I worry that their constant attacks on most Democrats drives many people away and can leave DU as a community only of the far left.

Now, I did see on GD-P, several threads where DK was raked over the coals for voting against health care. So, it might be that there is now self selection based on where people are most comfortable. Today, is actually not as bad as I would have feared yesterday given that I think almost all of us would have preferred a different plan than the one not really explained yesterday. I think it is healthy that many who like and admire Obama were able to say they disagreed, but still trusted that he was acting in good faith. Nor does it mean that they will change their opinion on the policy. This is mature.

The only difference is that there are no new issues or arguments in I/P forum because NOTHING HAS CHANGED in the moribund Middle East "peace process." We are where we were a decade ago!

you said the 'K' word and they swarmed like flies on a turd in the sun.
:rofl:
:kick: & R (just to piss 'em off)

OK by me.

subject itself to such discipline and instead functions as a place where criticism of the party and its policies can and does happen, although there seem to be posters who have big problems with that. The GDP mentality is quite proper in Sept and Oct of election years, but imposing that mentality at all times is not natural or healthy.

with great beaches! ;-)