You'll be missed, Jason.

I am confused.

You have had a lot interchanges with people who have taken your point of view seriously on this site. I have learned a lot from those interchanges. I think you did too.

The site is only the people who check the site out. If we all bore you now, we bore you. Complaining how the site is run feels like a throw away middle finger as your car speeds away.

I will miss you. I don't know any other self-identified conservatives who appreciate Howard Zinn.

Fare forward.

JEM,

Although I often thought you were a moron, I never considered you an unthinking moron. However misguided, your points were always considered. I understand your wish to move on. Enjoy your new home.

I had come to believe the pleas for more civil behavior were working for some, though I have seen the occasional "Get the F off my blog." I usually get off. There are a couple posters that annoy me because they can't be critiqued at all without going Vesuvius, and they can form alliances with others I think know better, seemingly based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." I can't like that, either.
Maybe I'm being obtuse on purpose, but I can't get your reference to homicide detectives. I hope that bitterness leaves you, or you leave it. Good travels, Jason.

JEM, quote from the one sentence blog:

I am saying that responding to irrational arguments is counterproductive to the democratic party's larger goals. That any response will have unintended consequences in alienating moderate conservatives and independents who are sick of that sort of thing. It may even turn off moderate democrats as well who no more fans of the divisions in this country.

A Party responding to irrationality irritates the moderates, a Party making irrational arguments does not. Good luck with that message.

Take care. Let me know where you land, and I'll hang out there, too. I personally would rather respond to conversations about how to solve and when to act. I am growing weary of the "look at the right wing freakshow" atmosphere at TPM. Josh is cultivating eyeballs by sensationalizing the right, and it is drawing a crowd of japers.

I know you got upset with it, but I think your approach was perceived as thread-nannying. Far better for you to stake a claim where you know you'll be welcome.

I am going to hang out here for a while, more to try and set up an open-source reading club. Given the tepid response to Fuller, who is probably the thinker most suited to our troubord times, I doubt the success of my endeavor.

C'est la vie.

Good luck.

Jason, there are times you bring very good things to the site. Your recent whining is not among them. Not everyone is going to agree with anyone all of the time, and you get no special pass for claiming to be the only dispassionate voice among the mindless partisans. Enjoy your lameout.

You certainly are one of a kind. You whine like a little girl about trolls yet you are one of the worst of that sort. You are forever deliberatly baiting and provoking people and hijacking threads and when they finally and inevitably lose patience with your bullshit you melodramatically announce that you are an injured party and make a fake threat not to return.

Here's the definition of troll found at the link you put above:

"The term derives from "trolling", a style of fishing which involves trailing bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The troll posts a message, often in response to an honest question, that is intended to upset, disrupt or simply insult the group.

Usually, it will fail, as the troll rarely bothers to match the tone or style of the group, and usually its ignorance shows."

This is what you do all the friggin time. Your harrassment and pointlessly baiting of IGMR in the same manner you have dcone it to dozens of others is what led him to lose his cool with you. Your sanctimony and self pity are pathetic and totally without justification. So you, the supreme baiter and annoyer of people at the cafe got your feelings hurt and put up a post implying you are not going to be around anymore which is totally disingenuous and done as a way for you to get attention and pity. How pathetic.

I hope you do leave, but I know you won't which is a genuine shame. But I would hope that if you do refuse to make good on your word and end up staying, as you are unfortunately likely to do, that you at least will refrain from now on from your constant monotonous argument about moderates and all that other bullshit you do when people post here. Make the point in your own posts by all means, but lay off doing it contstantly to others. You hijack more threads than anyone I've seen here and it's always the same bullshit.

I have absolutely no sympathy at all for you and pray you disappear into the interntet ether never to be heard from again. You are exactly the problem you whine about. Be gone! Stay gone! But whatever you do, quit hijacking threads with your dumbass "moderate conservative" bullshit.

Jason - Using the Report Abuse link, I have reported the reprehensible behavior of the blogger you refer to, as I know you have, and I hope others have as well.

There can be no tolerance for that kind of implied intimidation. I'm familiar with Internet incivility, bad manners, insults, and name-calling, but this goes well beyond those annoyances and is unacceptable.

If TPM acts appropriately, as I think they probably will, you should have no reason to leave, and I hope you won't.

Jason- you responded to this post

Let me clarify, jason believes what he says. The truth that he has problems facing is reality. The hope that moderates will wrest take control of the GOP is far fetched. Despite the intransigent nature of the GOP, it is Democrats who have to temper responses.

The more the public see of the 912ers, the birthers, the higher Obama's approvals go. The GOP has turned the tide on the health care issue, because the GOP scares the public, including independents.

Democrats have to stiffen up and offer a consistent message. The Republicans have given the Democrats a gift by their behavior. The GOP is pushing moderates and independents away. That is the simple truth jason does not face.
Posted by rmrd0000 in reply to a comment from rmrd0000

with this:

The truth that rmrd0000 refuses to see is that even if the crazy ass GOP turn moderates into non-voters for a couple cycles, that doesn't mean the country is going to turn super-duper liberal when the inherent nature of America has long been one of homeostasis leading toward gradual change over decades vide years.

The democratic party will be unable to moderate its message because of its crazy-ass fringe represented by illogical buffoons such as yourself, thus they too will drive moderates out of their party. If the GOP doesn't change, the only possible scenario is a new party emerging for moderate, logic-based Americans to go to and that destination won't be the democratic party.

You continue to confuse the meaning of Obama's election, the percentages of republican vote he picked up in primary elections in open states as well as the 10 to 15 percent of the republican vote he got in the general. The democratic party had the best chance in more than a generation to fashion a governing majority containing republicans, independents and democrats. People like you, the original poster and a handful of other TPM bloggers from the left are busy killing the burgeoning majority in the womb and are settling for 50%+1 tactical warfare instead.

Good luck with that strategy. It has yet to lead to anything worthwhile in this country.
Posted by jason everett miller in reply to a comment from rmrd0000

You turned up the intensity of the discussion, by using the term buffoon. You simply lack the diplomatic skills to be helpful in developing any consensus party. You characterize the Democratic party as "liberal" when it is obviously Centrist. If the Deomocratic Party were liberal the public option would be the foundation of the health care debate.

The crazies on the right have increased the possibility of a public option. I simply don't see the validity of your argument. Predicting future activity is fraught with hazard, but as of right now, I don't see the GOP winning the moderates or independents.

Despite your inability to mount a coherent argument for your plan, and despite your name-calling, Fred Gates (IGMR has now posted a name) did violate the spirit of TPM by using Google Earth.
Posted by rmrd0000
September 27, 2009 9:33 PM | Reply | Permalink

So, Fred gave me a call on me cell phone, further freaking my wife out, but we came to a meeting of the minds so to speak before we took the dogs for a walk around the nation's capital.

It's still a little freakazoid for my tastes, but I am willing to let bygones be bygones.

Still, I think it is either up to the site's administrators to enforce their stated policies or it is up to all of us. There really is no other choice.

Night for now. Will respond in the morning.

I've already said my piece to and about Fred (on his first blogs), as well as had my rant at Jason, and since then I've tried to just leave them both to their devices. But unsurprisingly, the two have now met - the immovable shit-ball meets the irresistable gale of stupid - and we all get to breathe in the joyous results.

So first off, thanks a lot, you two morons. Really. If you could be more selfish, more in love with the sound of your own voices, I donno how. So thanks for this. Tools.

That said, I don't think Fred is a real-world danger. He may be - I DON'T KNOW - but what I DO see is that he has no sense that people may rightfully want and be allowed to have boundaries around their blogging. See, he wants to merge Blogging together with his Talk Radio gig, as well as with his twitter network, with his design company, etc. There are reasons other people want these worlds somewhat separate, but if you mention that, Fred doesn't want to take time and think. He just shouts that you're afraid of new technology, and thinks he's won a point. So the idea that people might want to blog and be anonymous and not get crank called in their real life? Fred doesn't get it.

Fred seems to think everyone should have to be available to be crank called, whether they're a right wing politician, or simply someone Fred disagrees with. Like the people here. He's already been entangled in this issue once already, with Markg8. So this is not a first. Fred WANTS his Talk Radio thingie to be full of crank calls to right wing freaks and lots of shouting. But he also WANTS to hear from people HERE, directly, whether in support or to rant at him. He WANTS to talk to people direct - on the phone. It's part of his schtick. He WANTS them screeching at him. And he then WANTS to put them ON THE AIR. So pretty much everything he's done is intended to set the place on fire, and get people shrieking. He wants TPM to join the screeching.

As for TPM staff/management, God knows what they're up to. I mean, Fred already had a blog pulled here, after complaints. A "satire," it was a little radio play in which Trig Palin was machine-gunned, with sound effects, apparently to make some witty point about Death Panels. I suggested he pull it, as did others. Anyway, it was taken down fairly swiftly. But they let him stay. For me, management is just letting this place be overrun. It's now 12 hours of spam a day.... plus screaming assholes like Fred machine-gunning babies as satire... and then the usual morons doing their never-ending drama dumps and derailing of other people's threads. All they need do is pay a little attention, and now and then show somebody to the exit.

Grr, it always bugs me when Dan K says what I was going to say except better.

Jason,

This is a frustrating time for everyone who writes (or even reads) here. So many issues, so little getting done, leaders clinging to worn out beliefs as if it will all get better if they just work their way around their rosaries--ten free markets followed by a God bless America or two.

People on both sides of the ideological game are afraid, probably with good reason. The country we thought of as our strength, our solace, the place where we could be one people, is altered somehow. It seems that each disagreement has a shadow of something large and ominous looming over it, so that what should be reasonable discussions about how to do the right thing turn into battles, stuck in weird grooves.

This fear that turns discussion to something bad--it can't be of each other, really (although if someone dropped over to my house to pick a bone with me I'd be freaked out too.) So what is it?

I think the whole picture is changing--the balance of people working in their own self-interest and also for the good of the whole is fundamentally off somehow, and it's making it hard to talk about right action. (At least hard for me as you can tell from this ramble.)

Anyway, getting back to what Dan K said, I am usually one to respond to every comment and try to change a person's mind but right now I don't think it's possible. Personally, I think you should continue to write here and engage with those you can, but let what you say just be there as well, for the others who aren't into your style. Remember, a) people are clustered into ideological camps right now and b) nobody changes their mind in a crowd.

Your decision is up to you, but I've enjoyed reading your work, even if I didn't agree.

Ah, yes... now we see how many self-described "liberals" there think.

If Bill O'Reilly said a woman who got raped because she was wearing sexy clothes, you'd be very, very upset. Yet many here see this thread as simply JEM whining about past injustices.

Blame the victim people. How nice.

I know many people here at TPM hate actual history, but there's precedent and reason to believe that TPM simply doesn't care about policing their policy. Once upon a time, Bwakfat posted under the name workerbee and harassed another avatar in particular. (In fact, claiming to be tracking this avatar's name, IP address, etc. She was lying as usual -- including the bit about having a friend in the Dept of Homeland Security -- but you can see the conversation in the link.)

Why do I bring this up? Because workerbee was banned... but not Bwakfat. Now everybody on TPM at the time knew this. Including the TPM staff. Hell, Bwakfat brazenly even denies the incident's existence.

(Exactly how is this brazen denial different than what people here complain about the GOP? I digress.)

So much for the enforcement of policy.

I am appalled that after so many comments from some here about "I must nobly stick up for my friend", hardly anyone came out of the woodwork for Jason. (Old Grouch just being a classic point... where are you now?)

KateO left recently and commented how the site had changed -- right down to nailing how quinn place to his harem of tittering ladies (practically her words).

The Cafe is certainly decadent (look up the real meaning of the word) now and I see no reason why this post being on the front page is any worse that some of the usual doggerel we find there. Anyone who sees this post as worse than a completely inside "poem" about communes really has lost perspective. I see the result here is that many of the "in-crowd" engage in essentially teabagging behavior with no more understanding of things than those they like to blog endlessly about.

It was boring when the GOP went on and on and on about Clinton one or two years into GWB's term. It's also boring about how some people here are constantly posting about how GWB should fry/hang/whatever with a noodle. And those posts get routinely put onto the front page as well.

It's nice to find a subject everyone can agree on. Yes, we are all glad that GWB still isn't in the White House. I said it. How many more times does it need to be said? And without even wit at that!

Many here are so insecure in their own understanding of their "beliefs" that the mere challenge to them is taken as a hostile thing.

That's why the conversations tended to be self-righting back before the general election. People could really defend their views -- because on average the conversations were smarter, better grounded in reality, and were from people with something more than some random memory put up against the weight of scholarly work and analysis.

Well, Godspeed, Jason, godspeed. You went to the trouble of hosting Ripper and the now-nowhere-to-be-found gumbun when they went to Washington. People here have short memories. Not a surprise. As you've known for a long time, ideology is for those who have no brains of their own. It takes effort to evaluate each issue and see nuance. Effort, time, and some actual smarts.

With your departure, the air here can now be further purified for people to hearken back to their youth and ideals of the Kennedy's and Civil Right's Marches. For those that remember those days -- it was 40 years ago. Try to catch up. The present year is 2009. I hope you enjoy the echo chamber folks -- especially when you see it all your "ideals" slip away, as it always does when reality can't be faced.

Good luck, Jason!

I truly am sorry to hear you are leaving, but I completely understand why - I would do the same under the circumstances. For me, both you and clearthinker are reality checks - you've both make me think about what you're saying then do the research to clear up my ambiguities. In my opinion, both of you are far more towards the center of the political spectrum where we all should be. And the discussions should be civil - which I have not been at times. For what its' worth, I had begun to appreciate your posts and worked hard to grasp the essence of the meaning - sometimes I was successful and some times not, but that's what we call learning. Perhaps we'll run into one another at another blog. The world isn't as large as everyone seems to think it is - it's quite small.
Good luck!

I'm sorry to read about this situation, Jason. I used to argue a lot on usenet and my wife worried that someone was going to track me down, so I can understand your situation. And that wasn't even about politics. I hope you hang around, but good luck to you.

Jason, I hope whatever decision you make allows you more happiness. You have always responded kindly to my blogs, and your blogs have given me a different perspective on things as I twirl this world around in my head and pretend I have an idea of what the hell is going on.

Good luck.

Followed the link. Igotmyreasons was way way out of line there. He's done something similar before with Markg8 (ended by calling him on his personal phone, I think). I understand if your wife is getting freaked out by it. It's behavior that really should lead to banning of the commenter in question. Have you not had feedback from TPM management?

Not that it is much comfort, but my impression of the commenter in question is not that he is dangerously unhinged, just a kid with a complete lack of blogging etiquette.

God knows we can't stand each other, Jason, but I wish you the best wherever you go. Sincerely wish there were more Republicans like you, and hope that you meet with success in your efforts to reform your party.

guess i am a little late to the party. i hope to still see you around. i wish people knew how to disagree around here without fighting so hard about it. (that goes for pretty much everyone..)

i think most people are too lazy to really come up with an intelligent response. instead, they resort to rhetorical fallacies and ad hom attacks.

then there are the crazies who call you on your cell phone.

i think gasket's comments are spot on. it's nice to say that, because i've disagreed with him before.. his interp of FG/IGMY's behavior is defensible. it's also true that the community changes, and so does the discourse. it's taken a turn for the worse, granted, but you're doing something v. positive about that by posting about the comment policy and making the front page.

like i said, i hope you stick around.

I'm sorry to see you go, Jason. "Igotmyreasons" is a seriously foolish man with a serious lack of constructive things to do, but we knew that before he went off on you (again).

I'd be sorry to see you go, you're what qualifies as a voice of reason around here.

Sorry to see you go, Jason. I enjoyed your posts and comments. I, too, sometimes despair at the level of maturity and virulent language that gets thrown around here but I fear it is the nature of the Internet as I see the same at many other websites.

I hope you keep fighting the good fight for decency and I wish you well in your travels.

Jason, I also cosign on Dan K & Art Appraiser's comments above. You've always struck me as someone who enjoys the brawls and is willing to engage in days and week long battles that start out substantive and degenerate to "I know you are, but what am I?" You're kind of indefatigable, which is an excellent quality to have - except when it's not. Sometimes letting the other person have the last word (especially when you've made your point and it's turned into pure attack mode) helps preserve your own sanity (and that of others).

Last year some Google Savant was able to figure out my workplace and address from my brief bio at TPM (which did not include my full name). Ended up calling my work number and when I answered, hanging up. When I didn't answer, he'd leave asshattish voicemails. And sending me a post card at home. Unlike Jason, I had no idea what his real name was. So from there I removed most personally identifying info and scrubbing personal references with my user name from other sites as much as I could. And I also changed my blogging behavior to try not get in prolonged debates with commenters that are personally attacking me (which is quite a challenge. You can take the girl out the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of the girl).

This is the biggest reason why most people do not use their real names. Because while the vast majority of people on the internet are decent folks, occasionally you encounter someone who is not right in the head. And anyone who google earths your home and calls you uninvited is clearly NOT right in the head. That is way over the line stalkerish behavior, whether it was intended to be or not.

For the people who suggest this is acceptable, there are other posters who also use identifiable names on TPM and I don't think any of them signed up for having their homes looked up or unsolicited phone calls. If you're only defending it becaue you don't like Jason or his style, that's pretty sad. We can disagree vigorously but any disagreements should be held in the virtual world without it impacting people's real lives or jobs or families.