The Paranoid Mindset of the Rightwing Blogosphere

Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.

If you'd checked Google's Blogger Status on Thursday, you'd have found that message. When I found that I wasn't able to access my blogs to publish a post, the first thing I did was check Status. Google was down and it was confirmed. I would have to wait. Patiently or impatiently, I was going to have to wait.

One thing that I've learned about the internet over the years -- and have come to accept -- is that it doesn't really work. Not very well, anyway. Services are unreliable. Connections can be spotty. Machines break down and code, being written and configured by humans, can be faulty. In the early years, Blogger wasn't super reliable. But over time it's developed into a pretty solid and stable platform. This latest outage was the exception to the rule.

Others haven't learned that the internet doesn't really work. And those people went nuts. I cringed reading some comments on the Blogger Help forum. Another thing to remember when dealing with Blogger is that it's free. Pretty much the only thing Google does to make money off it is to make it easy to add Adsense ads. You get unlimited bandwidth and an infinite amount of blog posts for nothing. Let me emphasize that fact -- nothing. Yet people were "demanding" that their blogs be restored to their previous functional state, as if engineers were just sitting around waiting for someone to tell them to get on the ball. It was embarrassing. I'd imagine that many a middle finger was raised at many a monitor at Google's Blogger division this weekend.

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Scott Walker, History, and Wisconsin

Running kind of late today, so instead of a morning post -- morning being a lost cause at this point -- I point you to a New York Times op-ed by UW professor of history, geography and environmental studies William Cronon about Scott Walker, Wisconsin's progressive history, and how the two are totally at odds.

It's worth reading the whole piece, but here's the meat:

Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different. But there is something about the style of the two men -- their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views -- that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered. McCarthy helped create the modern Democratic Party in Wisconsin by infuriating progressive Republicans, imagining that he could build a national platform by cultivating an image as a sternly uncompromising leader willing to attack anyone who stood in his way. Mr. Walker appears to be provoking some of the same ire from adversaries and from advocates of good government by acting with a similar contempt for those who disagree with him

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