I just saw on CNN that the IRS spent over 50k in star treck spoof videos

[Occulus]

133. Well, I for one have had it with all the trollery trolling lately. I'm going to tell it like it is.

Last edited Mon Jun 3, 2013, 06:32 PM - Edit history (1)

Note to potential jury members: please read this to its end. I'm taking a risk in trying to tell some truth, here, by being as honest as I can be about what I see here and elsewhere on DU (as all such in any subject often do), but someone needs to call a spade a spade... even if it's probably too late and "offensive" or "over-the-top" to our nebulous "community standards", whatever they have most lately mutated into by the time this gets to you. As ever-changing as they are, they're mere suggestions at best, because rules have words that mean things and that doesn't describe something that is whatever six people decide that they are at any given time, in any given post. I don't know what makes a post hideable from one day to the next any more... and that bothers me, too. So I may as well dance my way across this thin scrim of ice I see before me. Enjoy, and please.. don't vote based on this peremptory appeal to your sympathy. Use your heads, instead.

I'm just a little bit angry with this thread and the legitimate, honest, actual democrats posting in it. If anyone takes offense at this post, or takes it personally, I'm probably talking to or even about you, so listen up. If this has a Metaish crunch with Metamallows and makes you want to make it swim in Metamilk, so be it. Meta's gone, for better or worse, but truth still needs to be told. I have a thing or two to say about this thread right here and many many others like it, and I'm saying it. I know this is painfully long, and I apologize for that if you manage to slog your way through it, but I think all of this needs to be said, and often. I'll take my chances, and let the chips fall where they may.

Rightwingers are ALWAYS "unaware". Their feigned ignorance, not a bit of which is honest- honest ignorance is forgivable; knowingly posting feigned ignorance, such as we're being fed so often lately and by such a determined but consistent few, has another word entirely- is their fig leaf, and worn publicly, with nary a blush for the rest of their naked dishonesty. The ideas that 'government employees are living high on the hog on YOUR TAXPAYER DOLLAR YARGLE' and that 'we must combat out-of-control governmental WASTE, FRAUD, AND ABUSE BLARGLE' are very very old and threadbare rightwing memes. Oh look! THIS THREAD IS FULL OF RIGHTWING YARGLE BLARGLE, and from so very few. And it's coming from exactly who you'd predict it would. Imaaaagine that.

Frankly, I'm surprised that we're all so cowed here on DU regarding identifying these people for what they so obviously are that we don't at least say something, anything at all, about how trollish this entire thread, and others like it, is solely due to some repeated usual suspects. Apparently, there are people on DU who get to use these ideas, peddle these intellectual poisons, tell these outright lies with apparent impunity. That shouldn't happen, not if the site's rules and policies are working the way they ought to, and if we were doing our jobs as legitimate, honest members with actual "community standards", those people wouldn't feel bold enough to keep trying it. I'm saddened by the number of people treating this OP as being anything close to being posted in good faith! Do none of us remember yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that any longer? Does a poster's prior, consistently-rightward slanting posts just fall into our own personal memory holes? Do we not consider that the patterns we see might actually be there?

Are we members of a Democratic site, and (largely) members of the Democratic Party? Or are we a lawless mob, each of us posting from somewhere in the wilderness?

When is enough finally enough for us to wake up to the outright rot we're being asked to swallow 'on good faith', in this thread and in others? Have we finally ignored or abandoned our own principles so completely that every position is valid, to be argued back and forth until the Sun dies, even when they're the ones we know are purely ideological and particular to the political so-called "philosophy" of the other side, and not of our own?

Some on this thread are actually calling for an investigation. It's like what happened with drug testing all welfare applicants in Florida (and public-assistance means-testing in general), and the thread about the expansion of that demonstrably and mathematically, incontrovertibly failed policy. Some of us may remember how surprising it was to see so many people cheering the expansion of such a sterling example of unsuccessful, money-wasting, and above all cruel and demeaning Republican policy (but I repeat myself, repeatedly); other, more astute and perceptive members will recall exactly who it was who started that cheering and how easily they conjured the groupthink necessary to get that unthinking, mass agreement, even in the face on the very same thread of actual, verifiable evidence that that policy did not and will not ever actually save any public money- rather the reverse. Do none of us recognize an obvious rightwing agenda anymore? Are we really going to accept the 'there are always two sides to the story and both deserve legitimate discussion and endless debate' falsehood, when one side is constructed of decades' old, well-known, deliberate lies about something we all know all too well the Republican "drown it in the bathtub" Party, to all our detriment, detests?

Is obvious obvious any more? Or do we now need debate on whether water is wet, the sun is hot, and down is the direction gravity pulls us?

The message in this thread's OP is "government workers are paid too much". That's Republican. The hook is "OH NOES! Civil servants are living large on YOUR TAXPAYER DOLLAR! STOP THEM BECAUSE THEY'RE BETTER OFF BECAUSE THEY WORK FOR THE GOVERNMENT, and "everyone knows" they can't possibly deserve to be paid well or get a travel stipend or expense account! TAXPAYER DOLLAR! It's WASTE! It's FRAUD! It's ABUSE! INVESTIGATION NOW! REPUBLARGLE RANDBLARG! VALID ARGUMENT! REFUTE NOT REMOVE! ME NO TROLL!"

All of that is Republican, too.

Shame on those who recognize all this as such- in thread after thread, day after day, from one puke to the miserable next, ad nauseam- for what it is (it's called trolling, by the way) and are saying nothing about it out of fear or exhaustion, for being so credulous and naive, or simply for being so tired of it all, that they're taking this OP as even close to honest or, worse yet, putting them on ignore altogether. Those who refuse to use the ignore feature thank that bunch ever so much for making their "refute don't remove" job that much harder, and for giving those same trolls some much-needed breathing room, when we all ought to pile on those trolls and then kick them hard in boy-band sync while they're down- either until the troll gives up and leaves, or better yet gets served a fresh, hot pizza, straight from Skinner's oven.

We've all heard these exact same Republispeek(tm) distortions, exaggerations, and outright lies before, literally for decades, beginning in earnest with that senile old racist lying two-faced bigoted shitfuck Ronald "I'm from the government and I'm here to help rape you of everything and starve your kids by calling ketchup a vegetable like me" Reagan, and we've been identifying those who use them as such, and ejecting them with both prejudice and very public glee, since the very beginning of DU itself. Why we aren't throwing off this site those who try to recycle these old and worn slogans (and not-so-cleverly repackaged at that, if this original post is any indication) so consistently is something you'd have to ask Skinner. Mod knows we used to, even when DU3 started. Now they just.... vanish. Sink like a ripple, with no fuss nor muss. And without knowing why they were banned, the trolls who remain aren't given notice that up with their shit we will not put.

"Savages" put heads on skulls. Society publishes the names of criminals and their crimes. Both are object lessons: here there be dragons. Now we are coldly, precisely surgical to people motivated primarily by emotion- hate and fear chief among them- and that does not and can not send such people any lasting message. In fact, by disappearing them as we now do, their removal sends no message at all, especially since now we can't know, ever, what got them banned. Trolls used to have that much of a clue, and it kept them quieter. It had to. They eventually ran out of nonpizza-worthy things to say. It was harder to troll, because the bannable offenses were clear and obvious... and most of all, excepting some notable cases (Fredda "my father was every Jew killed in the Holocaust" Weinberg, Omega "Menstruating Moon" Minimo, etc.) publicly enforced.

Yet for some reason, now, after all this time and experience, all the site refinements, and ups and downs, after all of the betrayals of false-pretense posters with tongues of silver and intentions of carbon black (emilyg, r_digital- both, I should add, exposed and damned publicly, with accompanying rock-solid proof, via crowdsourcing in Meta), we have apparently decided to allow them to stay. That's the only conclusion I can reasonably reach: these statements about waste, fraud, and abuse, about government workers living large on your dime, and so enthusiastically reported and promoted by the thread starter, too, are vintage Republican. They're of a very old vintage, so old its levels of background radiation are measurably different, and mark the bottle as aged indeed. It is so much the case, so blindly, brilliantly obvious it can hide in the shadow of its own light, that I am gobsmacked as to why certain members posting on this thread ever got beyond a few hundred posts, and I'm absolutely flabbergasted that they're still here after thousands, given the consistent, unchanging content of their too-clever-by-half musings.

Everyone "on our side" who has paid any attention over the last, oh, three decades or so of news media knows these phrases and slogans and dishonest mental tricks very well. Our political bodies are covered with the bruises the thick and fast propaganda has inflicted upon them. We've been battling those things, again, for decades. My entire life, easily, and I'm almost forty. This site is not intended, at its heart, for us to do yet more battle with them; this site is for us... and I think we've largely lost sight of that in the name of "the big tent" and "compromise" and "hope for change" and that ever-plasmidic, fluid set of "community standards" which nobody, including the admins themselves ever seems to be able to clearly or concisely define.

And that's sad. Our purpose here seems to have become, in a word, polluted... and the polluters are telling us with a straight face that tapwater which actually burns with a visible flame is somehow safe to drink.

So what gives? Why, in the name of everything DU is supposed to be about, are we accepting so-called "arguments" like "I saw CNN tell me something bad about lazy underworked overpaid government employees, OMG it must be true it was on CNN, what can we doooooo" (vintage appeals to honest ignorance, constructed strawman, and assumed authority: three more Republican mental tricks)? Why are we not instead shouting down those statements as obviously, agedly, manipulatively false framing, like this stinking, oozing original post, for the troll scat they are? Did our own, private, clearly-labeled tent finally become big enough that elephants like some of those in this very thread (and even now, I can't take too big a chance and name names, even though that's as obvious as blood on snow) can shit in it with impunity and not get shown the door? Or are those of us who do recognize it putting them all on ignore because we're afraid our transparency page might get revealed (ONOES), and us eventually banned, simply for telling the truth when it is right there in front of our eyes?

In the words of Ren & Stimpy's Mr. Horse, "no sir... I don't like it." Yet here we are, letting yet another one of this oh-so-easily identifiable types oh-so-"innocently" channel Ronald Reagan's miserable god damned fucking ghost, and foolishly giving it enough merit to warrant argument and discussion when we should be consigning those failed ideas, false talking points, and obvious agendas to the trash where they rightly belong.

Just how big of a handle does the spade have to have these days before we stop calling it a heart and call it the spade that it is?