I'll punch your teeth in if you don't stop claiming I'm violent

Given that I've written about the crack team of thought police over at CommonDreams on several occasions, I couldn't possibly pass up this gem from founder and chief control freak Craig Brown:

Commenters who react to the infrequent spam filter glitches by screaming "Censorship!" and spreading conspiracy theories about mass "censorship" will also be banned from commenting on the site.

Almost too perfect, isn't it?

WITH APOLOGIES TO BEAVERS: The 2007 article where I discovered that Brown and his goons had banned me from the site had at least 133 comments at one point, but they'd whittled it down to 127 by deleting both my comments and all responses to my comments by other people (you can see this for yourself in that first posting I cited above).  Looking at that same article again today, five years later, it's down to just 120 comments—so the busy beavers at CommonDreams eventually achieved a 10% comment censorship rate on that one article.  Impressive, but no surprise given that their scorched earth methods of erasing people involve removing not just a) the comment that crossed their invisible line but b) every comment the person has ever made on the site, c) responses to those comments by other people, and even d) comments by other people that merely mention the disappeared commenter's username.  (They ban their victims by IP address as well, though that's outside the scope of our little analysis.)

Has CommonDreams maintained this impressive 10% rate of censorship?  Does a 10% deletion rate make them the most aggressively censoring news and opinion site on the Internet?  And do the little Napoleons there ever feel even a twinge of conscience as they go about their shabby work?  So many uninteresting questions we'll never have answers for.

Comments

[S Brennan]

I didn't leave "left" blogastan, it left me...the left isn't in shambles, it's a pathetic joke.

Take Obama's bombing campaign to aid Libya's KKK/NAZIS lynch black folks living in Libya. 24,000 bombing missions in an 8 month period, that's 100 missions a day for a tiny minority of fundamentalist far more right wing than Timothy McVeigh...what's left blogastan's reaction?

YEAH OBAMA,YEAH OBAMA,YEAH OBAMA!

[gfod]

Yes, too perfect...of the you-can't-make-this-up variety.
Actually, maybe what they are objecting to are screaming and theories when it's just quiet fact.

[NomadUK]

Strawberries ... ice cream ...

[Lewis]

Had that experience too:

Now:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/17-2

Original:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:E_3yS_EocJ8J:https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/17-2+a+www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/17-2&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

[John Caruso]

Looks like the cached version may have caught up with the original (that's why I saved local copies when they did it to me).

[catherine podojil]

Hee, pretty funny. But you need to get some distance - of course this (John's post below) is possible, and you must allow for the vastness of the universe. Or not.

I had no idea this was going on. Don't know what to do. CD has so much that I want to read. Whom else is being banned, do you know? And is it all about Dem-bashing?

[John's post]
I'd been holding back a bit in my first posting on this issue on the theory that there might be some other explanation--like, say, someone tripping as they walked by a laptop that had an active MySQL session going, banging into the keyboard, and accidentally typing out "DELETE FROM WP_COMMENT_TABLE WHERE WP_COMMENT_USER = 'distantocean' OR CONTAINS(WP_COMMENT_TEXT, 'distantocean');" with their elbow and then inadvertently hitting the ENTER key with their nose as they completed their fall, no doubt theatrically screaming "Noooooooooooooo!" in the milliseconds before they made contact with the floor. Hey, it's possible.

[John Caruso]

Nobody knows what motivates their feverish little minds, mainly because they ignore any questions about it. As far as who else is being banned, if you're curious you can read those postings I linked to and see plenty of stories. One thing that may be a first is that they actually banned one of their own columnists (and read Sunil Sharma's comment in that article as well to get a sense of just what a puckering asshole Craig Brown really is).

My advice: take advantage of Commondreams for their rampant fair use violations and drive up their bandwidth costs, but don't give them a penny and don't waste your time commenting on their site.

[Paul D. (Yunzer, Sabocat, PJD, many others)]

Intresting, I had been been disspeared and banned many times in the past, as recounted in my comments to your blog entries from 4-5 years ago, from CD, but not since they changed over to Disqus. So, I had thought they had largely stiopped it. And, that is what is so diabolically insidious about it - even Orwell could have not imagined such a scheme of disapearing people.

[NomadUK]

Well, at least that's over.

[John Caruso]

I've copied your comment over to the "Droning on" thread, NomadUK, since I'm guessing you'd have put it there in the first place if that posting had existed at the time; hope that's ok.

[NomadUK]

It is more than okay, it is exactly right, and more than makes up for your sloth in not posting sooner! Cheers.

[thurnandtaxis]

That gem reminded me of a smaller gem.

[John Caruso]

So the same Imani Gandy (aka AngryBlackLady) who said "I prioritize my vagina over drones" also wants Chris Hedges to shut the fuck up? Hilarious. Truly a very special liberal.

[Little Brother]

I'm sorry I didn't see this thread sooner. My "Little Brother" signon was blocked at CommonDreams during their infamous Election Week 2008 mass purge, and this past August I was again picked off as their election season censorship ratcheted up.

CommonDreams "desaparecidos" may be familiar with this article published in 2008:

"Common Dreams? Or is it censorship in common with the corporate media?" by Tony Logan*

* http://tinyurl.com/b26uljk

Remarkably, the associated comments thread is still active! Over the past four years, several people banned or otherwise abused by CD administrators have vented their outrage and dismay on this thread.

Please check out at least some recent ones-- particularly my August 29, 2012 comment posted after my "Obedient Servant" signon was locked out with extreme prejudice. I thought about copying it and pasting here in its entirety, but thought it might be better to just read it in its original context. As long as you're there, have a look at the last few comments posted just last week.

I also recommend this 2009 article: "Progressives Disappearing Progressives"**

** http://www.metaphoria.org/issues/08vol16/ac4t0905.html

I only came across it weeks after I was banned in August, and couldn't remember ever seeing it before. Again, it's all old news to us, but it's a concise spot-on critique of CommonDreams that is as accurate today as it was then.

CommonDreams is the epitome of the insidious "Fake Left".

[mike]

Glad to see people talking about the censorship at Common Dreams, which is rapidly becoming one of the most right-wing sites on the web. I too have been banned for objecting to their virulent anti-semitism and their openly supporting Hamas' efforts to destroy Israel and murder millions of Jews, goals that both Hamas and the PLO very explicitly state in writing in their charters and which they regularly affirm verbally.

[John Caruso]

This would be the same mike who once revealed the dark and twisted inner workings of his mind here with this comment: "If [Israel] wants territory, then the Palestinians must agree. If it wants reparations, then the Palestinians must agree. If it wants control over the borders and security, then the Palestinians must agree. As the defeated people the Palestinians aren't entitled to a say. They have the right to surrender and accept Israeli terms, and that's it. If they don't come to their senses then they have the right to fade away into history." Just try substituting Palestinians->Jews and Israel->Germany in that sentence to get a fuller appreciation of the kind of person mike really is. How fitting that he'd choose to post yet more of his driveling hasbara here the very day his beloved Israeli Reich obliterated three generations of a Palestinian family.

Mike, the fact that CommonDreams banned you shows that even they get it right sometimes. You're done here as well. I pay money out of my own pocket to host this site, and I'll no longer let you use my site to carry one more word of your repulsive apologetics for Israel. If you want to see who the anti-Semite is, just look in the mirror.