The GOP thanks you for buying into their bogus city mouse v. country mouse culture wars.

Some required reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/opinion/05krugman.html

Posted at September 5, 2008 8:02 PM in response to The tyranny of small town America

Ran across a good answer to your post elsewhere, mho, and tracked yours down to share it:

...But in all fairness, their viewers watching OUR convention probably felt the same thing. Massed public power on the opposing side always is alarming.

Posted by Lux Umbra Dei
September 5, 2008 1:13 PM | Reply | Permalink

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/09/i-hate-it-when-i-agree-with-bi.php#comment-3081830

Think about why pep rallies are required attendance at many high schools as the football season gets on. The whole sports/school patriotism thing is an exercise in controlling and directing mob energies. (My little hippie freak high school sub-group understood what was up with that and hated it--we wanted in on some of more fun uncontrolled mob action going on on the college campuses.) It is unattractive to any individualist person, i,e., the type that says "I'm not a joiner," because even if well behaved, controlled or for a well-intentioned cause, it still reminds one of the power of the mob.

Posted at September 5, 2008 5:19 PM in response to USA USA

It's great to see your common sense presence invited here again.

Posted at September 5, 2008 5:01 PM in response to Technical Difficulties

And another suggestion: hire IT people who pay attention to what's going on on your site and are willing to alter instructions pages while problems like this are going on.

As another commenter has suggested, if someone had simply put a temporary "don't resubmit when you get an error message" instruction on the "blog now" page when the traffic grew, you wouldn't be having half the problems you're currently having. The problem is being exponentially enlarged by users not being informed with proper instructions.

In the three years I've been a regular user, the site never seemed to have had IT people who offer actual service. Rather, it has always seemed as if your editorial staff has to watch for tech and software problems and address them, and act as liasons with whoever was doing the IT, and they don't have time to do that. That ends up being very expensive in many ways.

Posted at September 5, 2008 2:02 PM in response to Long Dark Night of the Servers

And another suggestion: hire IT people who pay attention to what's going on on your site and are willing to alter instructions pages while problems like this are going on.

As another commenter has suggested, if someone had simply put a temporary "don't resubmit when you get an error message" instruction on the "blog now" page when the traffic grew, you wouldn't be having half the problems you're currently having. The problem is being exponentially enlarged by users not being informed with proper instructions.

In the three years I've been a regular user, the site never seemed to have had IT people who offer actual service. Rather, it has always seemed as if your editorial staff has to watch for tech and software problems and address them, and they don't have time to do that. That ends up being very expensive in many ways.

Posted at September 5, 2008 1:59 PM in response to Long Dark Night of the Servers

Simple fix for the future:

Stop using an entire week for your archiving.

Keep the archives in the same size packets as the first page, in reverse chronological order, like most websites do. I.E.., twenty posts per page or whatever, with links to "next page" and "previous page" at the bottom.

I never understood why you like having the archives in big weekly glumps. You've always done it on the main TPM page. It's always been a pain and uses a lot of power to load.

Not everyone is going to visit every day, if they want to read on to what you posted before that which fits on one page, they have to load an entire week and scroll down.

It's sort of dismissive of your own content, as if what you wrote beyond what fits on one page is no longer of interest except to researchers. It shows a prejudice to "breaking" and that posts a few hours old are no longer of interest.

The more you grow the worse it will get if you keep archives in big weekly glumps, and people can't flip page to page.

Posted at September 5, 2008 1:38 PM in response to Long Dark Night of the Servers

On your big question on this post and your comment on your other thread on Polany
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/09/want-to-vet-her-some-more.php#comment-3078551
on your other thread, I humbly suggest you may be getting waylaid in your thinking by mixing populism with fascism and I think it's important to realize and fully understand the difference.
Fascism but also plenty of other movements used populism, lots of leaders of the 1st half of the 20th century read or knew of Gustave Le Bon's "The Crowd;" he was bigger at one time than that other new theorist guy Freud.

It's funny because immediately after Palin and Guiliani's speech, I thought "populism clear and true" but also then on a couple of M.J. Rosenberg threads here earlier in the year where there were some sub discussions on populism. And an infamous Rosenberg comment saying something along the lines of "what's wrong with populism?" as if he was really clueless and naive about it and how dangerous it can be and could lead to fascism or other totalitarian movements. I think that was one time when everyone on the thread lost a lot more respect for him....

A couple quick suggestions. Found out at that time that wikipedia has a really good lengthy in progress entry on populism--I was impressed by it--recommend it, it might help you firm up your thoughts on all of this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism

Also highly recommend reading LeBon's "The Crowd," it's post copyright, available in full online free,
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/BonCrow.html
and is not that long, like 100 pages. Back in the olden daze, I studied fascism with the scholar on the topic George L.K. Mosse, and LeBon was the first required reading, like the bible to start decoding the mid- 20th century. I recommend it not just because of refining the populism/fascism relationship but because you will have fun seinge this internet forum and other forums in it--echo chamber, mob psychology, etc.

And I just discovered that wikipedia has a halfways decent entry on Le Bon now too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Le_Bon

Posted at September 4, 2008 6:05 PM in response to America May Be In Danger Now

2nd try on the reply, since it hasn't posted for 10 minutes. If two end up showing, please read this one, it's got additions:

Quinn,

I found some of your recent previous comments on other threads on the Palin kinda demographic quite helpful, too. I was even going to point to one, but with this server shit, it was too damn much work to hunt it down.

One of the things I noted with much interest was Palin stressing the "I am a public servant, I go to serve" issue.

Beyond the ever popular/populist "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" theme, there is another important thing going on there about "Obama the elitist."

It's the humility thing, stupid. John McCain knows how to do humility, now we see that so does Palin. I haven't it much from Obama yet, he's not a natural at it. (There was some of that in the CNN presidential candidate profile on

him, and in the Ryan Lizza article on his Chicago days--that he didn't realize that politics was about interacting one on one with individual people, that you had to do that, that they weren't just going to buy an "expert" giving lectures and sermons for these political jobs. That he had to teach himself how to do it, force it.) Bill Clinton knew how to do expert wonk tied together with empathy, that's an unusual combo of skills that one can substitue for being able to do humility. So far, I think Obama still gives off too many nanny state odors somehow. Like that
public health nurse that comes unannounced for a visit to someone like my Mom and lectures that she should really be nursing that new 4th baby rather than using that formula. Well, Mom knows that nursing is better, but she doesn't want to, has other considerations, how about that Miz Buttinsky.

"Serving the people" rather than "leading" them has a lot of appeal. A candidate actually humbly asking to be able to serve them has even more appeal. I still haven't seen much of the latter from Obama. Right now he's on the tube, there are sound bites from him that start "we need to do this...we need to hear this..." Who's we? Maybe I don't always want to be part of "we," maybe I don't need a leader telling me what to do for every problem (the socialism thingie.) Why not say "I want to serve you?" once in a while?

CNN also just played this soundbite from Palin's speech, that "they" want to "give you orders from Washington." The ever resounding nanny state theme.

And to go back to topic, that the liberal nutosphere wouldn't let go of demanding all the details about Palin family pregnancies, despite Obama's pleas not to, certainly brings nanny state concerns to the fore. (And you know, I don't buy that someone wanting to outlaw abortion is a nanny state type person. It was a clever, smart thing for the pro-choice folks to frame it as "choice," and I hope they still keep doing so. But that doesn't help convince those folks who equate abortion with something like manslaugher, if not murder. Everyone pretty much agress that laws against manslaughter and murder are not "nanny state.")

Posted at September 4, 2008 5:02 PM in response to Want To Vet Her Some More?

What a naive view of Josh Marshall. You obviously haven't read his theorizing about activist journalism, which he has happily shared in the past with MSM business reporters, and in seminars he gets invited to since he won a big journalism award for using new journalism to a political end.

Posted at September 4, 2008 4:56 PM in response to Sarah Palin: 1, Josh Marshall: 0

Reformat of above, so it's readable:

the Republican Party has all but written off the big cities, the black vote, the liberal-leaning independent vote, the unions, and, possibly, the Hispanic vote.

Doh, you didn't need Palin's speech to tell you that.

Charlie Cook outlined it well and simply yesterday, see

"McCain's challenge this week" @
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/09/mccains-challenge-this-week.php

and he pretty much implied that the Obama campaign knows it, too, and has known it for quite some time.

It's actually sizing up to be pretty much the same old same old swing vote with little difference from the last couple decades. They were always ill-defined by single terms like "working class whites," or the more recent "Appalachian" label du jour.

That's not what it is, it's not so simplistic, it just shows up that way in polls because of the demographic questions they use--there's Filippino-American Catholics, Palestinian-American small business owners, and Taiwanese-American engineers in there, too.

I just saw Carl Bernstein say on CNN that the only Dem who has been successful at winnning against this has been Bill Clinton--I think I can safely put words in Carl's mouth and say what he really meant is that the DLC methods have the only proven success rate here.

Watch Lou Dobbs, think about Ross Perot's appeal (so much so that a third party got started with some real steam in the beginning,) re-read the Lizza article (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/01/080901fa_fact_lizza
how'd all those Dem govs get in in the West?) Heck, watch network TV sitcoms, they are in there. Or--you're in Michigan, right?--look at the people in Michael Moore's films starting with the Flint originals--don't listen to what Michael Moore says, listen to the people in them. I think them's the votes; Moore knows the demographic well, he just hasn't a clue of how to connect with them.

I have seen lots of evidence that the Obama team knows what they have to get. For instance, their Michelle Obama speech was an attempt to steal the "family values" and "work hard to get ahead" flags; they focus grouped that one to death and polled on it in the states in question right afterwards. Another: I suspect the whole FISA thing was in preparation for the debates with Mr. National Security. I think the question really is choice of tactics and whether Obama can execute them successfully.

Posted at September 4, 2008 4:31 PM in response to America May Be In Danger Now