The "cute" little fucking messages he puts in the open threads are awful--made even worse by the fact that he cycles through the same six.
At this point, he's literally just dropping a Cleveland Steamer on his readers' chest. I keep him on my RSS so that I can read his last, poorly written post where he gives some half-assed rationale for why he's tired of blogging.
I wouldn't go so far, but his blog has pretty much gone to hell since he quit academe. Look at the archives and there was lots of stuff all the time, often interesting. I still find some of his occasional posts interesting but his purpose was to allow us to refresh constantly, and he don't get that done.
I think the posting of open threads over there is automated (seriously). He's still a pretty good place to go for links. There really is something to the "massive traffic on a poltical blog fucks with your ability to think" explanation: he and Glenn are basically dopplegangers.
Oh, and not to be shallow, but some people have the bloggic equivalent of faces made for radio. You can't fidget, fail to shave, flick your eyes back and forth, and swivel in your chair like a five-year-old if you expect to hold a tv audience.
One thing that I really respect about Atrios is his lack of intellectual vanity. He has concluded, appropriately to my mind, that these times are so fucking dire that intellectual generosity and honesty have the potential to do more harm than good. For a serious person -- and I do think that he's a serious person -- that's a real sacrifice, one that, if I had a blog, I suspect that I would be too vain to make. I find Krugman's reaction to the Bush years even more impressive, for basically the same reasons.
The Insta-comment is spot on; it's unfortunate, really. He was pretty good even as late as a 18 mos. ago. OTOH, it's wierd that he can act as a Insty-like clearinghouse for the left and not be the biggest lib. blog on the block. At least we're winning on the Net.
Hmm. Shit, I really don't want to say this, but I think you might be right, pjs. It's something I've thought about a lot, and decided that I just couldn't bring myself to do that kind of political blogging, and yeah, I think intellectual vanity is one way to describe what kept me from it--I cared more about myself than what was happening; I think I even thought (or was forced to think) at one point: "fuck the world."
Of course, on the other hand, some people might call it "integrity." It's a tough call; ultimately, I expect, one that comes down to whether people think principles or outcomes are more important--maybe that's an aesthetic versus utilitarian moral sense.
(Attempts to reconcile principles and outcomes will be met with scorn and derision.)
The last few days at least there have been rather more substantive posts at Eschaton than recently. I think the problem is not his departure from academe but his expanding punditude - evolvetv, testifying before congress, jetting around for interviews - and the usual lack of vacation time for the cartoonist - I mean, blogger.
Academic purists give Krugman and DeLong an enormous amount of shit for their political partisanship. I've written thousands of words on DeLong trying to convince people that in a two-party system you need to have partisans, that democracy doesn't work if the sharpest people refuse to participate, that politics is a legitimate vocation, and so on.
Some of the purists were anti-Krugman winger bots, but many claimed to agree with Krugman's and DeLong's politics, just believing that the two were demeaning themselves by soiling their hands that way.
I actually believe that the purists are wrong both ways. I think that scholars like Krugman and DeLong who get involved in politics end up having their attention called to realities which pure scientists are able to ignore, and thus have their work strengthened. (For example, I think that DeLong now understands the political damage that free trade did, and the political reasons why Clinton was only half-successful, better now than he did when he started blogging: even though the people hurt by free trade were a minority, too many of them were Democrats, so the bipartisan success hurt the Democrats and helped the Republicans).
I don't think that I changed the mind of a single purist, but some of them stopped coming around at least. There's some substance to the "liberal elitist" charge; many liberals and leftists seem to yearn for an apolitical society administered by experts.
It pissed me off a bit working that hard to defend centrist Democrats, but I've been in that position before. Establishment liberals are bureaucratic / academic normalizers and don't seem to understand conflict. They should all be forced to read Bartcop.
"One thing that I really respect about Atrios is his lack of intellectual vanity. He has concluded, appropriately to my mind, that these times are so fucking dire that intellectual generosity and honesty have the potential to do more harm than good. For a serious person -- and I do think that he's a serious person -- that's a real sacrifice, one that, if I had a blog, I suspect that I would be too vain to make."
Could you point to any specific instances of Atrios being dishonest? And why would one doubt that he's a serious person? In what way is Eschaton unserious?
I think we're entangling several different issues here.
1. Atrios simply doesn't try very hard anymore.
I'm sure you could demonstrate this by plotting the open thread/content ratio over time, or the avg no. of words/post over time.
The reason for this may be that he feels he serves a useful function simply providing a chatroom/clearing house. Or it may be he's got less spare time now that he has other fish to fry.
That's a separate issue from
2. PJS suggests, approvingly, that Atrios has become a bit of a hack (or at least, that's what I'd call someone who dropped intellectual honesty).
If this is true -- and I don't read enough Eschaton anymore to say if it is -- it's different from being a partisan, as in Emerson's terms. I don't think DeLong is intellectually dishonest, for example; Emerson says so himself when he notes that DeLong has marked his beliefs to market, to use his own language.
Both these points are distinct again from
3. "liberals and leftists seem to yearn for an apolitical society administered by experts"
Which, well, hang on, we're talking about how we feel about academic blogs, not society.
I feel quite comfortable and not at all elitist when I say I like reading a blog administered by someone intellectually honest, who will engage issues seriously -- who will even, as seems to be the case with ogged, frame issues with a bias against his beliefs to see how the discussion turns out. (You hear that, ogged? Big burden on you.)
I know full well that public discourse will never be like that, and I wouldn't want a presidential candidate (Adlai Stevenson) like that.
Atrios has occasionally self-identified as a "partisan hack." I don't think he means by this that he's intellectually dishonest; in fact, I think this is partly preserving his intellectual honesty (IIRC he was complaining about partisan hacks who don't self-identify as such).
But it definitely means that he places a low, low premium on calmly and reasonably engaging the arguments of people on the other side; he's more interested in firing up the base. This isn't necessarily intellectual dishonesty, it's a matter of emphasis. And I think pjs and Emerson are right here: The GOP is so fundamentally fucked up--as someone or other keeps emphasizing, a Bolshevik party that's willing to trample over all norms of democracy to retain power--that we need to fight it. And sweet, reasonable argument alone won't cut it; patiently arguments about why we're right and they're wrong is beside the point, because the GOP doesn't respond to argument--or anyway treats it only as a mean to arrive at the conclusions they've already settled on, like that computer program in Dirk Gently. (Can we doubt this, knowing what we know about the Iraq war?)
This isn't to disparage Slol's point that it's nice to have academic blogs that aren't like Atrios. (Blogs are inevitably part of the public discourse, but I don't think the existence of Obisidian Wings is giving the GOP a foothold. Even-the-liberal-Kaus, on the other hand... but I don't think what he's up to counts as intellectual honesty, either.) But some people, including friends of mine, seem to be angry that Atrios exists at all, because he's dragging Democrats down to the Republicans' level. To which I respond a) not hardly that far down and b) that's what John E. is talking about.
In related news, Stephen Bainbridge is complaining that the Republican party ignores conservative bloggers because the most prominent, such as Glenn Reynolds, "are not exactly stalwart Republican party loyalists but rather libertarians (or whatever) who put routinely put their principles ahead of party interests." To quote "Method Man," Torture, Motherfucker!
Yup. Atrios is dull to read these days (or at least entirely not to my taste) but he's probably a useful community organizer, and that's a more important good thing to be doing than providing me with thoughtful, entertaining commentary.
I do occasionally look at his comment pages, and muse, wonderingly, on the vast differences between what people are entertained by. How does anybody follow a conversation in those messes? (Again, not that there's anything wrong with that -- I just find them way, way too confusing and disjointed to read.)
I might go so far as to say that in times like these, NOT publicly taking sides and advocating your partisan beliefs borders on an abdication of responsibility, especially if you're someone with the readership of Atrios. No one thinks less of, say, the transcendentalists who passionately lobbied for the abolition of slavery. Or the German intellectuals who loudly resisted the Nazis. These are extreme examples, of course, but the "sullying your hands" argument is just cowardice, if you ask me.
via Apo. Now this is what the politicians should be doing, but maybe it makes sense for the bloggetariat too. Also--Your opponents. They're scum.? It's true.
I think I've remarked before somewhere that it's remarkable how Atrios manages to combine being a effective partisan attack dog with intellectual honesty, and it indicates that others who are less honest don't have as good excuses as they might think.
I don't find Atrios to be dull at all, and I don't think he's fallen off. He writes less long posts, but the shift was in 2003, not recently. And I don't think trying to find all those links takes less effort than writing longer posts.
The issue with DeLong, Krugman, and Atrios has been the choice of academically competent people to do blogs or newspaper writing which was primarily political and secondarily academic. The amount of opposition DeLong, especially, got really boggled me, and seemed to come from people who believed tht politics was not a legitimate activity at all for an academic to get involved in. I was only able to surmise that they would have preferred a non-political, purely administrative system. The only other alternative I could imagine was that they thought that our world is doomed to be controlled forever by politicized idiots, and that there was no use fighting it.
I don't find Atrios to be dull at all, and I don't think he's fallen off. He writes less long posts, but the shift was in 2003, not recently. And I don't think trying to find all those links takes less effort than writing longer posts.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say anything globally condemning of Atrios - just that his blog used to be to my taste, and now isn't. I do think what he's doing has important good effects.
Come on, David. Atrios hasn't jumped quite as many sharks as Glenn, but he's jumped plenty. How many posts of the form "Republican X says "some horrible thing" (where the horrible thing is an implication only on the very least charitable reading of the statement)" does Atrios do? A lot.
And it doesn't take him any time to find links; people send those to him.
Maybe this is worth a longer post, but on the one hand, I think he's doing good work, on the other hand, I have to hold my nose to read him.
I like some of his comments occasionally. I don;t read all of them, and I don't think of it as holding my nose. There's maybe one a day that's to my taste, as Lizard Breath put it.
"And it doesn't take him any time to find links; people send those to him."
He presumably has to go through of them to find the ones he want. But I have no idea if he spends less time on the blog than he used to, so maybe you're right. I would claim though that what he does now takes as much talent. What he's doing isn't just a roundup of news stories. Even ignoring the issue of honesty and morality, what he does is very different from what Reynolds (or say Boing Boing) does.
I was pointing out that what apears in Matt's 44 is not what apostropher wrote to produce 40, but rather what I Standpipeself wrote to produce 43, which in turn is what apostropher wrote to produce 40.
I ampersanded the greater-than for uniformity's sake, and because I thought I had to.
LizardBreath speaks the truth. Or, LizardBreath's comment 59 is a complex singular term, referring to Teh True. Except that, Mozillaite that I am, I put in more semicolons:
And back to the originalish subject of how much Republicans suck: Do not click this link and watch the video if you don't want your blood pressure to rise.
MW--Yeah that's bad. Is there any chance you can work on getting Rid of your Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer? I'm living in a solidly blue place and feel pretty impotent.
Could take some work--this is allegedly the second most conservative city (pop >100K) in the U.S., and in '04 Stenholm--an incumbent screwed by redistricting, and as conservative as Democrats come--58/40. My colleagues tell me that there were a lot of people holding their noses at Stenholm fundraisers. Living in a solid red place doesn't make me feel much less... I forget what I was going to say.
This guy says that the second-most-conservative city study just counts who voted for Bush and Kerry, and so makes Texas cities look much more conservative than they are. Hm.
Yeah, but surely there must be some sort of DFA group or something. Is there no way to move the debate along? They've got to run someone everywhere just to get the message out. Ugh, so frustrating.
DFA doesn't seem to be doing anything round here. I guess I should rally some support, though I prefer ranting on blogs.
God that study was dumb. Why didn't they just say "Pro-Bush" and "Pro-Kerry" cities? Why didn't anyone mention that the most liberal cities were lots more most than the most conservative cities; for instance, 75% Bush gets Lubbock #2 conservative, while 75% Kerry gets Pittsburgh #34 liberal? Did you know that cities tend to vote Democratic, especially when black people live in them? I feel so dumb for having paid attention to this for one second.
Yes to both--it's non-partisan, but Rocky is a pretty liberal Democrat, unlike the conservative Democratic county mayor (helped by major Republicans scandals), and the conservative Dem representative from about half of the city and the loony strongholds of southern Utah (thank you, gerrymandering!) Rocky is also non-religious. I was still surprised that the city went for Kerry; didn't expect the difference to translate that strongly to the national level.
(I lived there for a year, one block from the Temple, which is why I care.)
It felt more conservative than Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, but maybe I wasn't meeting the right people. (Like, living next door to the Temple Square tour guide girls might have skewed my picture.)
I have, but only a couple of times. I'm sure it's more conservative than pretty much any large Northeastern or Midwestern city, but compared to southern Utah (with which I am more familiar) it seems like a veritable People's Republic.
How awesome is it that The Weblog has The Open thread? One, two, many awesomes.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:36 PM
Yeah, I liked that. They're running a good blog over there.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:39 PM
Man, good call on Atrios. If only the technology existed that everyone could have Diaries instead.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:41 PM
The singularity should take care of that.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:42 PM
My thread was inspired by Atrios.
The "cute" little fucking messages he puts in the open threads are awful--made even worse by the fact that he cycles through the same six.
At this point, he's literally just dropping a Cleveland Steamer on his readers' chest. I keep him on my RSS so that I can read his last, poorly written post where he gives some half-assed rationale for why he's tired of blogging.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:27 PM
I wouldn't go so far, but his blog has pretty much gone to hell since he quit academe. Look at the archives and there was lots of stuff all the time, often interesting. I still find some of his occasional posts interesting but his purpose was to allow us to refresh constantly, and he don't get that done.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:32 PM
I think the posting of open threads over there is automated (seriously). He's still a pretty good place to go for links. There really is something to the "massive traffic on a poltical blog fucks with your ability to think" explanation: he and Glenn are basically dopplegangers.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:33 PM
Filtering the internet for their audience has reduced them to automated intelligence agents for a hive mind. They've become the singularity.
Only there's two of them.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:35 PM
The doubularity?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:40 PM
Oh, and not to be shallow, but some people have the bloggic equivalent of faces made for radio. You can't fidget, fail to shave, flick your eyes back and forth, and swivel in your chair like a five-year-old if you expect to hold a tv audience.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:43 PM
Yes it's automated, he alluded once to the threadbot freaking out.
I think Adam is more right than the "ability to think" part; at this point Atrios just doesn't care that much.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:43 PM
10 really belonged in the other thread, I know.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:44 PM
One thing that I really respect about Atrios is his lack of intellectual vanity. He has concluded, appropriately to my mind, that these times are so fucking dire that intellectual generosity and honesty have the potential to do more harm than good. For a serious person -- and I do think that he's a serious person -- that's a real sacrifice, one that, if I had a blog, I suspect that I would be too vain to make. I find Krugman's reaction to the Bush years even more impressive, for basically the same reasons.
Posted by pjs | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:44 PM
The Insta-comment is spot on; it's unfortunate, really. He was pretty good even as late as a 18 mos. ago. OTOH, it's wierd that he can act as a Insty-like clearinghouse for the left and not be the biggest lib. blog on the block. At least we're winning on the Net.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:47 PM
Hmm. Shit, I really don't want to say this, but I think you might be right, pjs. It's something I've thought about a lot, and decided that I just couldn't bring myself to do that kind of political blogging, and yeah, I think intellectual vanity is one way to describe what kept me from it--I cared more about myself than what was happening; I think I even thought (or was forced to think) at one point: "fuck the world."
Of course, on the other hand, some people might call it "integrity." It's a tough call; ultimately, I expect, one that comes down to whether people think principles or outcomes are more important--maybe that's an aesthetic versus utilitarian moral sense.
(Attempts to reconcile principles and outcomes will be met with scorn and derision.)
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:05 PM
(Attempts to reconcile principles and outcomes will be met with scorn and derision.)
dammit, I tried to do that on my philosophy midterm yesterday. I forsee mocking comments from the prof on my paper.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:09 PM
The last few days at least there have been rather more substantive posts at Eschaton than recently. I think the problem is not his departure from academe but his expanding punditude - evolvetv, testifying before congress, jetting around for interviews - and the usual lack of vacation time for the cartoonist - I mean, blogger.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:24 PM
Is this a good place to mention that I'm feeling ill?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:45 PM
I agree with PJS.
Academic purists give Krugman and DeLong an enormous amount of shit for their political partisanship. I've written thousands of words on DeLong trying to convince people that in a two-party system you need to have partisans, that democracy doesn't work if the sharpest people refuse to participate, that politics is a legitimate vocation, and so on.
Some of the purists were anti-Krugman winger bots, but many claimed to agree with Krugman's and DeLong's politics, just believing that the two were demeaning themselves by soiling their hands that way.
I actually believe that the purists are wrong both ways. I think that scholars like Krugman and DeLong who get involved in politics end up having their attention called to realities which pure scientists are able to ignore, and thus have their work strengthened. (For example, I think that DeLong now understands the political damage that free trade did, and the political reasons why Clinton was only half-successful, better now than he did when he started blogging: even though the people hurt by free trade were a minority, too many of them were Democrats, so the bipartisan success hurt the Democrats and helped the Republicans).
I don't think that I changed the mind of a single purist, but some of them stopped coming around at least. There's some substance to the "liberal elitist" charge; many liberals and leftists seem to yearn for an apolitical society administered by experts.
It pissed me off a bit working that hard to defend centrist Democrats, but I've been in that position before. Establishment liberals are bureaucratic / academic normalizers and don't seem to understand conflict. They should all be forced to read Bartcop.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 6:16 AM
"One thing that I really respect about Atrios is his lack of intellectual vanity. He has concluded, appropriately to my mind, that these times are so fucking dire that intellectual generosity and honesty have the potential to do more harm than good. For a serious person -- and I do think that he's a serious person -- that's a real sacrifice, one that, if I had a blog, I suspect that I would be too vain to make."
Could you point to any specific instances of Atrios being dishonest? And why would one doubt that he's a serious person? In what way is Eschaton unserious?
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 6:20 AM
I think we're entangling several different issues here.
I'm sure you could demonstrate this by plotting the open thread/content ratio over time, or the avg no. of words/post over time.
The reason for this may be that he feels he serves a useful function simply providing a chatroom/clearing house. Or it may be he's got less spare time now that he has other fish to fry.
That's a separate issue from
If this is true -- and I don't read enough Eschaton anymore to say if it is -- it's different from being a partisan, as in Emerson's terms. I don't think DeLong is intellectually dishonest, for example; Emerson says so himself when he notes that DeLong has marked his beliefs to market, to use his own language.
Both these points are distinct again from
Which, well, hang on, we're talking about how we feel about academic blogs, not society.
I feel quite comfortable and not at all elitist when I say I like reading a blog administered by someone intellectually honest, who will engage issues seriously -- who will even, as seems to be the case with ogged, frame issues with a bias against his beliefs to see how the discussion turns out. (You hear that, ogged? Big burden on you.)
I know full well that public discourse will never be like that, and I wouldn't want a presidential candidate (Adlai Stevenson) like that.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 7:18 AM
Atrios has occasionally self-identified as a "partisan hack." I don't think he means by this that he's intellectually dishonest; in fact, I think this is partly preserving his intellectual honesty (IIRC he was complaining about partisan hacks who don't self-identify as such).
But it definitely means that he places a low, low premium on calmly and reasonably engaging the arguments of people on the other side; he's more interested in firing up the base. This isn't necessarily intellectual dishonesty, it's a matter of emphasis. And I think pjs and Emerson are right here: The GOP is so fundamentally fucked up--as someone or other keeps emphasizing, a Bolshevik party that's willing to trample over all norms of democracy to retain power--that we need to fight it. And sweet, reasonable argument alone won't cut it; patiently arguments about why we're right and they're wrong is beside the point, because the GOP doesn't respond to argument--or anyway treats it only as a mean to arrive at the conclusions they've already settled on, like that computer program in Dirk Gently. (Can we doubt this, knowing what we know about the Iraq war?)
This isn't to disparage Slol's point that it's nice to have academic blogs that aren't like Atrios. (Blogs are inevitably part of the public discourse, but I don't think the existence of Obisidian Wings is giving the GOP a foothold. Even-the-liberal-Kaus, on the other hand... but I don't think what he's up to counts as intellectual honesty, either.) But some people, including friends of mine, seem to be angry that Atrios exists at all, because he's dragging Democrats down to the Republicans' level. To which I respond a) not hardly that far down and b) that's what John E. is talking about.
In related news, Stephen Bainbridge is complaining that the Republican party ignores conservative bloggers because the most prominent, such as Glenn Reynolds, "are not exactly stalwart Republican party loyalists but rather libertarians (or whatever) who put routinely put their principles ahead of party interests." To quote "Method Man," Torture, Motherfucker!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:03 AM
Yup. Atrios is dull to read these days (or at least entirely not to my taste) but he's probably a useful community organizer, and that's a more important good thing to be doing than providing me with thoughtful, entertaining commentary.
I do occasionally look at his comment pages, and muse, wonderingly, on the vast differences between what people are entertained by. How does anybody follow a conversation in those messes? (Again, not that there's anything wrong with that -- I just find them way, way too confusing and disjointed to read.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:09 AM
I might go so far as to say that in times like these, NOT publicly taking sides and advocating your partisan beliefs borders on an abdication of responsibility, especially if you're someone with the readership of Atrios. No one thinks less of, say, the transcendentalists who passionately lobbied for the abolition of slavery. Or the German intellectuals who loudly resisted the Nazis. These are extreme examples, of course, but the "sullying your hands" argument is just cowardice, if you ask me.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:16 AM
via Apo. Now this is what the politicians should be doing, but maybe it makes sense for the bloggetariat too. Also--Your opponents. They're scum.? It's true.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:35 AM
Hey, those are good.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:43 AM
What Weiner said. Great comment.
I think I've remarked before somewhere that it's remarkable how Atrios manages to combine being a effective partisan attack dog with intellectual honesty, and it indicates that others who are less honest don't have as good excuses as they might think.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:46 AM
Joe,
I totally agree that this is a time when it's important to stand up and be counted.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:47 AM
What Weiner said: 22 specifically.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:47 AM
I don't find Atrios to be dull at all, and I don't think he's fallen off. He writes less long posts, but the shift was in 2003, not recently. And I don't think trying to find all those links takes less effort than writing longer posts.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:08 AM
The issue with DeLong, Krugman, and Atrios has been the choice of academically competent people to do blogs or newspaper writing which was primarily political and secondarily academic. The amount of opposition DeLong, especially, got really boggled me, and seemed to come from people who believed tht politics was not a legitimate activity at all for an academic to get involved in. I was only able to surmise that they would have preferred a non-political, purely administrative system. The only other alternative I could imagine was that they thought that our world is doomed to be controlled forever by politicized idiots, and that there was no use fighting it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:12 AM
I don't find Atrios to be dull at all, and I don't think he's fallen off. He writes less long posts, but the shift was in 2003, not recently. And I don't think trying to find all those links takes less effort than writing longer posts.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say anything globally condemning of Atrios - just that his blog used to be to my taste, and now isn't. I do think what he's doing has important good effects.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:15 AM
Come on, David. Atrios hasn't jumped quite as many sharks as Glenn, but he's jumped plenty. How many posts of the form "Republican X says "some horrible thing" (where the horrible thing is an implication only on the very least charitable reading of the statement)" does Atrios do? A lot.
And it doesn't take him any time to find links; people send those to him.
Maybe this is worth a longer post, but on the one hand, I think he's doing good work, on the other hand, I have to hold my nose to read him.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:17 AM
I like some of his comments occasionally. I don;t read all of them, and I don't think of it as holding my nose. There's maybe one a day that's to my taste, as Lizard Breath put it.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:21 AM
30: The thing is now he writes fewer posts, period. I do think it may be because Media Matters etc. takes up more of his time, as rilkefan said.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:27 AM
"And it doesn't take him any time to find links; people send those to him."
He presumably has to go through of them to find the ones he want. But I have no idea if he spends less time on the blog than he used to, so maybe you're right. I would claim though that what he does now takes as much talent. What he's doing isn't just a roundup of news stories. Even ignoring the issue of honesty and morality, what he does is very different from what Reynolds (or say Boing Boing) does.
Posted by David Weman | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 9:35 AM
Atrios hasn't jumped quite as many sharks as Glenn, but he's jumped plenty.
If only Atrios wrote ogged polite email responses every couple months, it'd all be gravy.
Posted by Isle of Toads | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:29 AM
Disturbing, if true.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:38 AM
Joe D, How do you do that blockquote thing with the smaller type?
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:47 AM
<blockquote>quoted text</blockquote>
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:49 AM
Yes, that.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:49 AM
How did you type that without having it come out like this:
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:51 AM
<blockquote>quoted text</blockquote>
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:54 AM
&lt;blockquote&gt;quoted text&lt;/blockquote&gt;
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:03 AM
Is this signaling a switch from the old, reliable italics for thing said by someone up-thread to a new, risky policy of
?Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:18 AM
I dunno, washerdreyer, but my quote from Matthew Holt in the health care thread would have been better presented as a blockquote. Thus my curiosity.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:21 AM
All we're doing is introducing some competition, and letting the market sort it out, w/d.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:25 AM
should really be
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:26 AM
Yeah, I didn't italicize the word italics, so it's improper parallelism.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:45 AM
weiner(matt) is
the new e.e.
cum-
mings
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:52 AM
There's too much escapism in 44.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:00 PM
Copy and paste and I get
<blockquote>quoted text</blockquote>
which is right, non?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:12 PM
And why is it necessary to write out >?>
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:13 PM
Ha! By hitting two adjacent keys at once, I prove my point!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:13 PM
I believe SB was merely stating Standpipeself's objection to escapism generally, not pointing out an error in your usage.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:15 PM
Ah so.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:31 PM
I've never used the term 'Standpipeself' before. It's curiously satisfying. Standpipeself standpipeself standpipeself.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 12:39 PM
I was pointing out that what apears in Matt's 44 is not what apostropher wrote to produce 40, but rather what I Standpipeself wrote to produce 43, which in turn is what apostropher wrote to produce 40.
I ampersanded the greater-than for uniformity's sake, and because I thought I had to.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 3:11 PM
My belief is that that was intentional -- that Matt was simply posting one of a series whose next term would be:
Or, in other words, what Matt typed to produce 44.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 3:15 PM
I thought about that, but my commitment to Homerism (were there really two of them?) prevailed.
In other news, MW is now matt matt weinings.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 3:23 PM
LizardBreath speaks the truth. Or, LizardBreath's comment 59 is a complex singular term, referring to Teh True. Except that, Mozillaite that I am, I put in more semicolons:
But the important part. about my intention, is right.
Posted by matt matt weinings | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 3:51 PM
And back to the originalish subject of how much Republicans suck: Do not click this link and watch the video if you don't want your blood pressure to rise.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 4:07 PM
MW--Yeah that's bad. Is there any chance you can work on getting Rid of your Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer? I'm living in a solidly blue place and feel pretty impotent.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 4:25 PM
Could take some work--this is allegedly the second most conservative city (pop >100K) in the U.S., and in '04 Stenholm--an incumbent screwed by redistricting, and as conservative as Democrats come--58/40. My colleagues tell me that there were a lot of people holding their noses at Stenholm fundraisers. Living in a solid red place doesn't make me feel much less... I forget what I was going to say.
This guy says that the second-most-conservative city study just counts who voted for Bush and Kerry, and so makes Texas cities look much more conservative than they are. Hm.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 4:42 PM
lost 58/40
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 4:43 PM
Yeah, but surely there must be some sort of DFA group or something. Is there no way to move the debate along? They've got to run someone everywhere just to get the message out. Ugh, so frustrating.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 4:46 PM
DFA doesn't seem to be doing anything round here. I guess I should rally some support, though I prefer ranting on blogs.
God that study was dumb. Why didn't they just say "Pro-Bush" and "Pro-Kerry" cities? Why didn't anyone mention that the most liberal cities were lots more most than the most conservative cities; for instance, 75% Bush gets Lubbock #2 conservative, while 75% Kerry gets Pittsburgh #34 liberal? Did you know that cities tend to vote Democratic, especially when black people live in them? I feel so dumb for having paid attention to this for one second.
Huh, Kerry carried Salt Lake City.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 4:55 PM
Aren't girls supposed to be impotent?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 8:14 PM
Salt Lake isn't like the rest of Utah. I think its mayor is a Democrat.
(That is, his positions sound pretty liberal. It's probably a non-partisan position.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:36 PM
Yes to both--it's non-partisan, but Rocky is a pretty liberal Democrat, unlike the conservative Democratic county mayor (helped by major Republicans scandals), and the conservative Dem representative from about half of the city and the loony strongholds of southern Utah (thank you, gerrymandering!) Rocky is also non-religious. I was still surprised that the city went for Kerry; didn't expect the difference to translate that strongly to the national level.
(I lived there for a year, one block from the Temple, which is why I care.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 10:47 PM
I thought you had, which is why I was surprised you were surprised it went for Kerry. Interesting place.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:07 PM
It felt more conservative than Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, but maybe I wasn't meeting the right people. (Like, living next door to the Temple Square tour guide girls might have skewed my picture.)
You been there, I take it?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:10 PM
I have, but only a couple of times. I'm sure it's more conservative than pretty much any large Northeastern or Midwestern city, but compared to southern Utah (with which I am more familiar) it seems like a veritable People's Republic.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 10- 7-05 11:23 PM