Bloggers in New York, part II

About a week ago, I addressed the question of why, as I put it then, "New York is not experiencing [a] bottom-up, internet-led, grassroots vs. party machine resurgence."

Since then, coming out of this truly insane comment thread at The Daily Politics (see also this follow-up), I've come up with another theory: people are taking this shit too personally. Usually I feel the reverse is true--people don't take politics personally enough, certainly don't believe often enough that it affects them personally. But something's going wrong here. In the last few weeks, two of the more insightful, well-connected bloggers in the nascent New York political scene, Gatemouth and Rock Hackshaw, have called it quits purely because things are getting so abusive. I often disagreed with both of them, but I found Gatemouth very entertaining, and Rock came up with some interesting scoops.

I don't know what's driving this nastiness. Contrary to stereotype, I've usually found New Yorkers to be nice enough. (Just yesterday a complete stranger bought my girlfriend a cake and bubble pipe when he heard we were all out celebrating her birthday. ) At any rate, the blog triumphalism I've been reading everywhere in the aftermath of the YearlyKos conference seems like another world from what's going on at the moment in New York.