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August 4, 2007 at 2:29 am
No, I’m sorry Frank, but I’ve seen my share of hatred on the Internet from all portions of the spectrum, (I once said years ago, even Christians hate each other on Usenet, ) and you can’t reasonably say that hate isn’t an important staple of Daily Kos.
August 5, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Actually, I must disagree.
What O’Reilly and his accomplices to is comb the comments looking for nutcases.
If you gather enough people together in a room, you will find a certain percentage of them are nutcases.
In my mathemathics, it’s known as
K(sub)i
It’s the “Idiocy Constant” in human nature–a certain percentage of the persons we deal on a daily basis will necessarily be idiots. If you can’t deal with that, you can’t deal with people.
If one focuses on the posts on Kos, one sees a lot of outrage.
Outrage is not hate.
But in the links I cited in the original post, I see a lot of hatred–hatred of the other, hatred of those who disagree, hatred of those who dare to think differently from how the blog-owners think they should–wishes expressed to kill, maim, destroy those who disagree with those blog-owners.
Wishing harm to others–now, that is hatred.
Those folks have forsaken the “free market place of ideas.” For them, it is their way or the highway.
Frankly, I prefer the highway.
August 6, 2007 at 10:48 pm
No, that doesn’t fly, because in a long list of other areas of life, providing a forum for hateful comments but divorcing yourself from the hatred would be called hypocrisy. In a world where Rush Limbaugh was blamed as one of the reasons for the Oklahoma City bombing, DailyKos and sites like it can step right up and be judged by their own measure for all I care.
August 9, 2007 at 10:06 pm
(Sorry for the delay–I’ve been busy.)
I don’t recall blaming Rush Limbaugh for the Oklahoma City bombings, nor do I recall anyone with any credibility doing so, but that was a long time ago and I well might have missed something.
True, he’s bloviating blowhard who makes stuff up, but that’s irrelevant to this discussion.
He’s also a hypocrite, who thinks he deserves rehab for behavior for which he would comdemn others to incarceration. But that’s not pertinent to the issue–it just casts a light on his character.
In the sites that I cited (Oh! Look! I’m almost a poet and didn’t know it!), it is the proprietors of the sites, not the commentors, who say that persons should be harmed because of their beliefs.
Coulter, in particular, has a history of saying very nasty things.
I would not hold any one of those three responsible for the comments which they get, though the wingnuts would hold Kos responsible for the comments (not the posts) on the site.
I can hold them responsible for their own postings.
And their postings are often full of hate.
Geez oh man, Opie, I know you have watched O’Reilly. So have I.
I don’t know anything about his private persona, but his public persona is hate-full, as in full of hate. He conducts himself in a nasty, hateful, and rude manner.
Maybe it’s a marketing decision on his part and he’s a really nice guy down t the local pool hall. But it’s by his public persona by which the public must judge him.
Oh, yeah, and he lies.