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[iverglas]

29. I clicked to reply in this thread

And I had DU mail - your host retirement notification. I hadn't realized I was operating in such real time!

I wouldn't presume to counsel or pressure one way or the other.

I see two phenomena, as far as what has brought you to this abyss.

DU itself began a steep decline about 3 or 4 years ago, maybe earlier. Just to take your one example, there were always comments about how people would get what they deserved when they were in prison. They were not daily occurrences, and they were countered when they did appear. But that sort of thing has grown and grown, and the voices of intelligent people of goodwill have stopped being heard.

The whole concept of fundamental (inalienable, etc.) rights has just been abandoned by the US in general, and a large segment of the DU population in particular. Reproductive choice and marriage choice, for instance, aren't a matter of people's human rights, they're all about somebody else's alleged religious beliefs. Criminal sentencing isn't a matter of justifying limitations on the exercise of the right to liberty, it's all about bloodlust and vengeance, with some vigilantism thrown into the mix.

There are simply no principles left. Anybody whom one does not like who dares to claim any right or freedom can go fuck themself (or get fucked), in the estimation of the mob. It's even better in Guns, with its daily multiple pronouncements about how the vermin infesting the gene pool need to be righteously cleansed from it, and my property is worth more than your life. And we're talking about 15-yr-olds' lives. In Guns, we know they're right-wing trolls (which of course raises the obvious question of why they are allowed to be here, sometimes for years). In the rest of the place, they're increasingly just standard issue.

The wayward Puritans, the Jerry Springer audience, have completely taken over. The finger-pointers and blame-layers and navel-gazers and Fuck you Jack I'm all right chorus.

And the form is worse than the substance. The lying and lying and lying, the gross misrepresentations, the baseless, false allegations made against other posters in lieu of response. And of course the chorus of eggers on every time.

So the whole thing was a mud puddle before DU3. As far as I've been concerned from the start of this DU3 thing, what it is, now, is a cash cow. We "DUers" are the product being delivered to the advertisers, just as we are when we watch television and listen to radio, and the revenue is being reaped with a fraction of the effort. Wind it up and turn it loose, under the guise of "community" control, the big democratic experiment. The result is unrestrained trollage, complete absence of standards, and the online equivalent of street gangs. Garbage.

If you're interested in stepping outside the USAmerican mire occasionally, I can link you to more or less the counterpart site in Canada -- or what would be if DU really were a community of progressive individuals. I don't actually post there myself. (Well, I did a couple of times a year or so ago, and managed to offend someone so much in one post they announced they were leaving! I had an accomplice in that effort, someone who had agreed with me, so I won't claim full credit. But goddamn it, the Green Party makes me puke -- for entirely different reasons!) Actually, you might even find you miss DU ... the moderation there is very heavy. One reason I don't post there is that endless yammering much along the lines of the pro/anti-Obama, pro/anti-Occupy, in that case about our social democratic party and who the next leader should be, go left or merge with the centre, blah blah, is about as tedious to me as what's going on here is to you guys. But misogynist language is definitely not tolerated. And hell, it even has a separate forum for sex worker talk.

I'm not in a position to "judge" your decision; it's all very easy for me, looking in from the outside, not to get as sick/depressed about it all (despite how they all are persuaded I'm just all the time so upset, bleah). I do think it's sad that it's come to that for you.