A few days ago I posted about my experiences on various web blogs and used two of them (Red State and Daily Kos) as examples of the good and the bad on the net. In my post I complimented both sites on being very informative during the campaign but also took them to task for being a tad intolerant of opposing views.
To make it clear I obviously did not expect such sites to promote the opposition or to have their views changed by my own feeble postings, but I was upset at the lack of basic respect and tolerance of debate. I had no issue with a firm and vigorous debate but did have issues with open faced personal attacks and being banned from commenting for expressing opposing views.
To their credit, Kos took me up on the comments and someone there started a thread to discuss the issue. While some of the comments were the same boring personal type attacks, most were a respectful and well intentioned debate of the subject and I give them real praise for doing that.
I’d also like to respond to a couple things that were said. First off it seems that I misunderstood how posters are banned from the site and I would like to apologize for that. None of us are perfect and I made an error there and freely admit it.
As to the types of comments that got me tossed (I’m not sure what the proper term to use would be since it seems I’m not entirely clear on the system for banning/tossing/etc) they largely occurred during the Convention period and involved either my saying I thought McCain or Palin did an OK job with their speeches or that Clinton/Biden/Obama did not do as well as some others thought.
I also ran into problems when I expressed views similar to those of these last 2 threads where I said that I didn’t think talk of crushing/destroying/etc the enemy (i.e., Republicans) was a good idea. Again coming to the idea that while obviously you want your side to succeed, you should respect the right of the other guy to have his views.
As to what my personal views are, I suppose the best way to find out would be to read TMV and look at my posts. In this last campaign I was sharply-critical of the GOP and did not support Senator McCain but at the same time expressed concern about the Democrats having unbridled power (i.e., cloture proof majority in Senate/etc versus reasonable majority to govern).
In any event I compliment Kos on giving my views a look. I haven’t heard from the man himself but expect I’m a bit too far down his radar to get one.