I made an off-the-cuff suggestion on Hunter's Daily Kos 4.0 Suggestions Thread regarding changing the Diaries-and-Comments site structure of Daily Kos. The idea's been growing on me ever since; and I think it bears fleshing out in a separate diary.

See, the current structure of Daily Kos is like this:  Each story or diary acts as a "seed"; and the comment threads for each diary conceptually form a "tree". Each diary+comments tree grows for a while, until the diary scrolls off the list. Then the discussions end; the branches die out; new diary seeds are planted, and the old, abandoned diaries and their comment trees are filed away into the near-oblivion of the archives.

But with just a few changes (detailed below), that underlying structure could be radically transformed:  Instead of a series of discrete trees with limited lifespans, we could have a continuous, evolving "grapevine" of interconnected discussions. This would solve a number of persistent site complaints as a side effect; and it could be done without radically changing the site's interface or giving up any of the advantages of the current diary+comments system.

It's been a year and a half since the ability to add easy links to dKosopedia was added to this site; I don't think there's been a story or diary specifically discussing this feature since then.  So to recap:  You can create a link from any word or phrase to the dKosopedia article of the same name, by simply putting double brackets around it. For instance, [[George W. Bush]] becomes George W. Bush. (Notice the special styling to indicate that it's a dKosopedia link.)

So why is this a good thing? When should you do it? And what is dKosopedia, anyway?

Consider: Any one of us has a limited number of other people whom we know well enough to accept as reliable sources of information. We trust information that comes from these people first-hand; and we usually trust information these people relay to us second-hand, from people they trust and will vouch for in turn. But if someone tells us something that got passed to them from a source they don't know themselves, we generally regard it as hearsay and rumor. In effect, our reliable news sources are limited to those from whom we are at most one degree removed.

Below the fold: the role of the media, why this is a problem, and how we can fix it

I looked at the feed URL, and sure enough, the user name parameter wasn't labeled as such:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailykos/user?Armando

http://feeds.feedburner.com/dailykos/user?user=Armando

Could somebody please make this change to the template for the diaries page so that it generates valid URLs!

Or that, when you come across a political term on another site, you could quickly pull up that term's dKosopedia entry and related Daily Kos diaries?

Well, I did, so I wrote a little javascript bookmarklet that does just that. (script and instructions below the fold...)

Note: I'm not a javascript pro, and I've only tested it in Safari and Firefox. It doesn't work correctly in Firefox -- the dKosopedia frame overwrites the diary frame due to a redirect. Feel free to make improvements/suggestions!

Conservatives see legislation as a direct expression of their values -- sort of like a state-enforced personal code of conduct. It doesn't matter what effect a law has, as long as it embodies some sort of moral principle. Liberals, on the other hand, see legislation as a tool for actually realizing their values -- they judge laws by their effectiveness and expected consequences.

This is why liberals and conservatives have such different views on issues like contraception and affirmative action:

Unfortunately, he presented his work in the form of Euclidian-style geometrical proofs, complete with definitions, axioms, corollaries, etc. The end result wasn't very accessible, and has been largely neglected or derided since (although Albert Einstein endorsed it, among others).

Anyway, here's my attempt to adapt that aspect of Spinoza's work to the form of a Biblical parable, so Creationists can follow along (needless to say, it's a vast oversimplification of Spinoza's thinking):

Here's the frame we use to do it:

Bush's failures stem in large part from Congress' failure to exercise its constitutional role of advising and overseeing the administration. An executive branch run amuck is the inevitable consequence of a legislature that has abandoned its obligation to act as a balancing power.

If we can succeed in framing Bush's failures in this way, it will be the Republicans in Congress pushing for impeachment in an attempt to exonerate themselves.

I am a man. "Women's issues" don't necessarily take precedence over every other progressive issue for me. I think a lot of Kos' abortion-related diaries have been unfairly branded as misogynistic. And I couldn't have cared less about the pie ad.

Even though I'm not part of the "women's studies set", I found Kos' initial response to the ad complaints to be as asinine as nearly everyone else, and I was glad to see him back off.

But.

I think his apology, where he tried to limit his criticism to "a small, extremist set looking for signs of female subjugation under every rock", really exposes the underlying problem here.

Because I do consider myself a part of that set.

(more below)

When there's a question of whether or not a particular person/fetus should live or die, the consistent liberal position is that the government shouldn't involve itself. Rather than (or in addition to) arguing the individual merits of capital punishment, abortion rights, euthanasia, etc., we should be pushing this point. (Ironically, it's an argument that ought to particularly appeal to small-government conservatives.)

Identify current progressive officeholders who are working on underfunded but potentially successful local projects. Get some money together here on dKos that we could use to make those projects succeed. Then write letters to the editors of local papers extolling those successes, and how they were accomplished with little taxpayer funding.

Then when elections come up, these officeholders would have a portfolio of local successes they could use in their campaign ads, as well as years of built-up name recognition.

But the Democratic Party doesn't have to maintain a single, monolithic identity in order to be a viable political force. It needs to transform its structure to support a multiplicity of identities: It can become a virtual "super-party" by providing a framework within which semi-autonomous "factions" could coexist without spoiling each other's campaigns or compromising their ideals.

Here's how it could work: