How to form a circular firing squad.

[rrneck]

1.Create an ideology.

2.Focus that ideology on a single issue to the exclusion of all others.

3.Invest so much emotion into it that you cannot bear to to have it challenged.

4.Disregard the possible consequences of the implementation of that ideology beyond the issue upon which it is focused.

5.Declare the place where you express that ideology its exclusive province.

6.If others accept your ideology, never disagree with them.

7.Stop at nothing to force others to accept your ideology.

8.If others do not accept your ideology, stop at nothing to drive them from your presence.

-------------------------

This is an exceptionally well moderated forum populated by passionate and intelligent people. If I could presume to offer suggestions about how it is run, a few things come to mind.

1. Don't create "refuge forums". Anybody with a star can go anywhere anyway, so there is no real refuge. It's just divisive.
2. Create "enemies forums". Places where people can rail about bad policies and people in the Republican Party. I came to DU for years just to see the Top Ten Conservative Idiots. If people can recognize a common enemy, they are more likely to put their individual differences aside and pull together.
3. Update the hate mailbag so we can jeer at the bleatings of banned trolls.

DU is not a think tank. It's a community. Communities need a common cause and the same problems and people who gave us that cause before 08 are still there. Hell, Newt Gingrich may run for president in 2012 fer crissakes! We should focus on them, not on each other.

[el_bryanto]

1. I wonder if someone will do a post entiled "How to sell out principle for pragmatism."

That said obviously we can all be a bit better at accepting each others opinions and attitudes.

Bryant

[rrneck]

3. Looks like you beat them to it. nt

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

2. We love suggestions here.

:loveya:

[HereSince1628]

4. Newbies, what's to do with them? They have no sense of how we got here

Why do you think there are places that are special forums? Do you really think forums didn't emerge as attempted solutions?

Why aren't you aware that hate and fear are cognitive motivators to CONSERVATIVE behavior? Why would DU a site that is interested in democratic and progressive causes want or need to be more conservative?

[rrneck]

5. Hate and fear are cognitive motivators

to human behavior. Conservatives, believe it or not, are human. So are liberals.

Conservatives are wrong about a lot of things, and we should have a place to point out how wrong they are. It has to do with recognizing common cause instead of dividing up the spoils of a victory that has only just begun.

[HereSince1628]

7. Please, don't take my word for it... read the scientific paper

Jost et al, “Political conservatism as motivated social cognition,” Psychological Bulletin vol 129, pp 339-375


It's not a put up rant by someone on the professional left, it's not even a put up rant by a non-professional leftist.

And, yes, of course we are all human.

[rrneck]

10. Thanks for the ref. I'll look into it. nt

[EFerrari]

6. Think tanks are communities.

And I have no desire to organize my online time around hating someone.

[rrneck]

8. But you can hate what they do.

This is DemocraticUnderground. It is designed to be a blatantly partisan website. Conservatives get run off. The people that made DemocraticUnderground possible are still out there screwing up the country. On any given day how many derisive threads appear regarding the current crop of right wing crazies outrages against common decency and fairness?

We would all like to think our motivations are of the most high minded sort, but it just ain't so. We need a place to express our anger at someone or something other than ourselves. While there are a lot of very intelligent people here presenting a lot of brilliant ideas, I don't thing there has ever been, nor will there ever be a DemocraticUnderground white paper that directly influences public policy.

It seems to me this place is driven by emotion, and if we don't recognize our emotions and properly handle them, they will devour us.

Elections are not won through complacency. The only difference between us and them is we have a genuine reason to be angry.

[EFerrari]

9. Apparently I don't have the faith in hatred that you do.

:)

[rrneck]

11. I don't have faith in it.

But I have learned to expect it. It is a part of being human, and denying it doesn't make it go away.

[TheKentuckian]

12. The firing squad would be hard pressed to form a circle if everyone was shooting in the same

direction.

[rrneck]

13. Although there is a danger in overusing the metaphor,

that's what I'm suggesting. "Enemies" was probably the wrong word to use, but I think we need a place for common cause rather than creating more places for individual clusters of competing groups.