[lbo-talk] Re: Kos [was: the political wing of the organized working class]

info at pulpculture.org info at pulpculture.org
Thu Apr 20 16:02:58 PDT 2006


Really, have you people even read his book. he does not care about grassroots anything. it is a book full of key words and hot air. he doesn't care about people, he cares about winning elections and he's working in an environment where he thinks that the measure of success is this:

if you want to be heard, start a blog. if you get readers and traffic, great. that means your issues are important in Koslandia. If your issues are not interesting and no one reads, then you are not important. Too bad for you.

There is no recognition of people who have jobs that afford them the time to blog, of people who technical skills and resources that afford them advantages that others don't have, people who have money that afford them laptops so they can blog anywhere, people who don't have noses to wipe and rugs to vacuum.

He works in an environment that is completely structured by hierarchies of linking, ranking and running around -- for christ sake -- threatening people who don't toe the line with delinking them.

This is grassroots? This is called another version capitalism where the goods are artificially limited by fucking rankings. Where the goods are 'status' conferred on you by getting linked. Where getting linked only matters if the linker only links to a select few since, if they link to everyone, that means less in the scheme of things.

This is democratic? It is not. That is much more like a feudal fiefdom. he doesn't give a shit about, for example, a woman who goes by brownfemipower (http://womenofcolor.blogspot.com) who'll make you drop your mouth with wonder at this beautifully intelligent, politically savvy former immigrant farmer worker who has, so far, written about disability issues, queer issues, black-Latin/a relations, tried to have a conversation with a white working class guy, and so on and on. She is not queer and she's not disabled, but she's been down and out enough in her life to give a flying fuck.

she will never be a Kos because of the nature of what she talks about -- the things we're supposed to talk about.

and yet, Kos thinks that, because she has 400 visitors a day on Sitemeter stats (I'm guessing), her issues are nobody's.

Oh, too bad, no one reads you.

And when people ask for inclusivity, the asshole points to two women who runs a blog who have tons of money! I can't think of their name now, but one hails from Hollywood.

Please! Spare me. Grassroots my fat furry ass.

Yes, yes, the limit is three. Whatever. i can't even believe I'm reading people on a lefty email list fantasizing that Bloglandia is democracy or grassroots. My god, just look around you and notice that it's the same system of artificial scarcity that you see within a capitalist system.

Unbelievable.

Talk to the Radical Women of Color community. They know something about building a community. Kos does not.

At 06:02 PM 4/20/2006, Blackmail wrote:
>I was about to say that if anything he's dedicated to rebranding the
>Democrats in an allegedly grassroots way...
>
>On 4/20/06, Max B. Sawicky <<mailto:sawicky at verizon.net>
>sawicky at verizon.net> wrote:
>Kos is too full of himself to take advice from anyone.
>Dems are anxious to work with him because he helps them raise money.
>He's not very ideological in any case. He's got this quaint SDS-circa-1965
>idea of participatory democracy, transplanted to the Internet. He said in
>an interview on Jon Stewart that his two favorite pols are Mark Warner and
>Russ Feingold, who are about as different as you can get within the party.
>He is mainly focused on helping Dems win elections, an objective which
>dovetails with his business (selling ads on a Democratic partisan web site,
>and providing Internet-expertise related services to electoral candidates).
>



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