"No, ban anyone who repeatedly engages in trollish behavior, like ad hom attacks on people whom they disagree and can't have a respectful discussion with, who go into psychotic meltdown mode instead."

I was dramatizing, and yes, Glenn has every right to direct the conversation on his blog, but while I can see why people would think that if adnoto and others engage in personal attacks, they fail to add to the discussion... The posts you were responding to from adnoto did not contain personal attacks! Actually, even if he didn't provide many strong answers to how to move forward, he was responding to numerous requests to state what exactly he believed was needed to fix our system... Haven't read to the end of the comments yet, but so far, it seems only JKalos was willing to actually address the substance of what he said (DCLaw might have too). If he or others make immature ad hominem attacks, by all means call them out for them, but even if he resorted to them earlier in the thread (I forget at this point), by page 25 or so, he was a part of discussion, whether anyone liked his contribution or not... And most who responded to his thoughts ad-hommed it up themselves in return.

(I think adnoto is male, apologies for the wrong pronoun if not).

My, my, my. The fog is thick outside my window at the airport. And brain fog is pretty thick amongst some of the fine posters here at UT.

All you Revolutionaries need to get together, you know, and, like, Make Revolution already. No? Instead you get all hot and bothered when somebody like me says, "You know what? It's not going to happen. Not from the Left. If it happens, it's gonna happen from the Right." Something everybody already knows and chatters about incessantly. So they say. Of course they lie, but what the hell...

Sacrilege! Sacre bleu! You can't say that, and anyway, what Reagan did wasn't a Revolution, it was a Reaction. Know your terminology! Busheviks and Reaganites are all Reactionaries!!!

Revolution is only possible from the Left? OMG. Now who doesn't know what they're talking about? Jeebus, what complete poppycock.

History lesson: Reaganism was intended to remake the United States Government into what it is today: corrupt, militaristic, imperialistic, corporatist, lawless, and autocratic. You may think it was always like this. That's your right, and that's what Reaganites and Busheviks want you to believe, everything was always just as bad as it is now. Reaganism proceeded by purging the taint of Progressivism from government operations. You know, things like regulations, ultimately the rule of law itself. You can call that a reaction if you want (and you'd be justified), just as you can call it a revolution (and you'd be justified.) The point is, it was successful and we're all living with the wretched and worsening results.

We've had almost thirty years of this shit, and there has been no uprising, hardly even a serious protest against this revolutionary/reactionary crap from the Left. Is it because adnoto or Glenn or I didn't lead the masses in a Long March to Victory? No. It's because the masses aren't all that troubled by this crap. "Organization" isn't going to make them be troubled by it, either. As a friend said a little while back, as long as they have their take and bake pizza and big screen teevee, they don't care.

Take their pizza and teevee away, actually or metaphorically, all hell will break loose.

But it won't make them demand a restoration of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, won't make them require an end to torture, won't make them want to ensure equal treatment under the law, or universal health care coverage, or decent wages for honest work, or an end to the forclosure nightmare, or end military and imperial adventures or really any of the things most of us believe are important.

And that's the truth.

The shattered economy, the obvious theft from the Treasury, the horrendous jobless numbers, the millions forced out of their homes, the gross corruption of government, its lawlessness and arbitrary "justice," the disastrous military adventures, the natural and man made calamities, none of this has so far triggered wide-spread action beyond the restricted and accepted political norms.

What passes for the Left has a whole lot invested in those norms and isn't going to do much of anything -- no matter what -- to jeopardize what little normalcy remains.

On the right, however, it's a whole other ball game. If they see their (Reaganite) revolution jeopardized, or even if their access to pizza and big screen teevee is threatened, they've got nothing to lose by fighting to back. And they will.

And in the meantime, may you all gain Peace, Love, and Understanding...

"When the moon is in the Seventh House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars..."

Did the Right revolution happen because the masses were troubled by the supposed excesses of the 60s?

Or did it happen because they had their shit together and organized? Hint: churches are organizations.

It's fine if you want to keep asserting that organization is totally irrelevant to revolution, but it'd be more persuasive if you could show that organization hasn't been the pivotal factor in every revolution to date.

Of course, if you couldn't, you might have to re-evaluate your whole stance, which is probably discomfiting.

Re: Peace, Love, and Understanding

This is becoming weaker by the moment. The light fades, dims, and becomes darkness. Amidst all the bellowing, there is no there there. Let me channel GoodCelery! and say:

O, sir, why beer barrel around belly?

No clothes to fit?

Revolution is not at hand

Thanks Reagan! (he was Irish?)

We now left with trash heap;

Armchair equals nothing but comfort;

Await Sacrilege! Sacre bleu!

Real thing.

I'm sure some correlation could be drawn between the increasing apathy on the Left and the corporate infiltration and consolidation of the mainstream media rising in tandem with the Reagan presidency and its faux-libertarian trappings.

And in that sense, it seems to me that the internet has a ways to go in successfully combating the corporate noise machine... While adnoto might be misguided in looking to bloggers for leadership, I think there's still a critical gap between "legitimate" bloggers and the "loony fringe". I certainly don't expect a policy-oriented blog like UT to be the starting point for that; on the other hand, considering its devotion to Democratic politicians, Salon.com as a whole could probably represent a broader spectrum of liberal/progressive/left beliefs. Like with MSNBC, it's a good step to see media outlets willing to take on the GOP and administration without impunity, but I think the next 4 years will be crucial in determining if these outlets are indeed liberal, or just in the bag for Democrats. I'm not criticizing, I know it's a process that will require evolution, but it won't evolve if readers simply substitute for mainstream media sources with web sources.

I have a feeling that immediate economic necessity will catalyze popular dissent quicker than e-media, simply because of the dire straits into which we're rapidly heading this winter, and I do expect internet media to take notice before the MSM is capable of doing so, so I do feel this new medium has a lot of promise that simply has yet to be realized in full.