Oceankat,here's the difference between you and me: I never felt  a personal insult from him because I don't consider myself a "snowflake", especially if a "snowflake" is as unclearly and confusedly defined as he uses the term. Just as someone else ranting about liberals being fascists about political correctness, or Sandernistas, or "Repuglicans", or whites who voted for Trump being racists, I don't take that as a personal insult and never do and never have because I have a strong sense of individualism and loathe being stuck in a stereotyped group. Just won't do it., no way.

But the rant and group name-calling type of discourse always bothered me even though I don't take it personally, I just don't want to hear it! I'd rather not see it I consider it idiotic, meant for lowest common denominator. It's frigging stupid emotional crap trying to demagogue people into political action via stereotyping enemy groups. And I do sometimes see it here from friendlies, about Republicans, and it just so turns me off unless it's tongue in cheek and done with humor, and then I like it. Because it's sort of parodying those who do it sincerely.

Back in the Bush years of the bygone blogosphere everyone thought it cool do rants against the enemy groups, ranting was a new cool thing. That was a long time ago! Can't we all just admit it just so uncool and stupid now? Nowadays people see Trump being expert at this technique and more don't think so highly of it even if partisans about the opposition. I'm grateful for that, because it was: stupid.

I'm just not interested in spending time on a site where people do it a lot, especially as I more clearly see how short life is. Why do I have to be the sounding board for anyone's angry rant about Republicans or snowflakes?! Guess what, doh, I don't--I can be dismissive of that person's laziness in discourse just as I was dismissive of laziness in discourse with undergrads when I was a T.A.

The only intriguing thing about Peter was that his memes seemed all confused when he does his rants. They didn't make sense. They took 60's leftist lingo and applied it to enemies of Trump. That just didn't make sense. I was looking at him like a specimen, just like a ranting crazy person on the street, or a ranting nut on Fox News or an angry child. And surprise, surprise, when he was challenged with "WTF are you even talking about?" , he could switch into another more normal non-rant, non-insult voice, in which he expressed opinions that no one here likes but I don't mind reading in the least.

Back in the Bush years a lot of blogs found that a variation of this rule for commenting which worked: no personal insults of other members. That you can insult Bush or Kerry or Dems or Republicans all you want, but not directly other members. Also if you are to argue, to criticize the comment and not the person making it. I think Peter for the most part followed that rule, tinkering around the edges.

But the blogosphere rant/insult style of commentary is so so very old and tired, and I never liked it in the first place, that I totally welcome PP saying "talk normal or leave."

Here's the thing., there's another problem, another issue involved. With Trump doing it all the time., there is the argument among political activists whether the opponents should give back as hard as he's giving. I understand that. That's a political tactic. It's about manipulating the public, inflaming passions, and looking down on that public like they are stupid enough to be manipulated with emotions.

To me, this is the real civility argument: do you want to hang around with and discuss and analyze news and policy and politics with some intelligent educated people, or do you want a political horse race site  and political activism site where people shout at each other and try to gin up excitement about politics and try to do rant and poltitical spin? It is the same argument I had in 2007-8 with Josh Marshall talking about making TPM Cafe for "activist journalism" when a bunch of us had been using it for intelligent discussion about domestic and foreign policy and news since 2005.. And I was going: you can't do that, you can't mix those two groups, it's like oil and water.  Right after that he opened the floodgates by basically introducing all the Obamabot activists from the other side of the site into TPMCafe. You either want to produce political spin or you want to deconstruct political spin, you can't do both.

It's very ironic that Michael Wolraich and the other founders here came with that group. I will just leave that at this: ah but he's a published historian now.

Peter's been doing a lot of political spin. Crazy political spin that often makes no sense. I'm all behind telling him to "talk normal" Because  you know what the real insult is when people stereotype for political cause? An insult to intelligence. We know not 100% of registered Republicans are evil nor are 100% of liberals "snowflakes" whatever the hell that means. It's insulting to the reader's intelligence to say that, and I'm all for leaving that kind of political talk out of my reading whenever I can unless I'm analyzing it as a specimen of the stupid.