Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Tuesday, March 22, 2005

19:09 - I do not think it means what you think it means
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=15158_Demand_Google_News_Transparency&

(top)

This is very enlightening, and very sad. In this example, starker than any I've yet seen, we get to see how the definitions of concepts like "racism" and "Naziism" and "hate" have changed in our modern discourse�and not, I fear, for the better.

Charles Johnson of LGF, in another installment in what's become an ongoing issue with the headline aggregation policies of Google News, has pointed out that while his own site had been repeatedly denied the voluntary listing by that service, the neo-Nazi site National Vanguard has been granted it. Now, while I can frankly see how this is consistent with Google's stated policy�namely, that any "news site" that sources original material is fair game for listing, and LGF really doesn't produce enough new material to qualify�the storm that has swirled up around the matter has brought a few very ugly things to light.

Read through the comments on Jeff Jarvis' relevant thread to see the two sides of the argument at work: one, positing that Charles is a "racist" and a "Nazi" because his site (which prior to 9/11 was the home of an easygoing but occasionally grumpy long-haired art dude who liked to bicycle around Orange County and poke mild fun at George W. Bush) nowadays has the primary goal of pointing out real, documented instances of outrageous expressions of the virulent ideology that drives the enemies that attacked us three and a half years ago, and that the commenters on his so-called "hate" site (the smirkingly self-described "Lizardoid Minions") are little removed from the "digital brownshirts" that Al Gore spoke of with such fervor. And the other, defending Charles against such claims, challenging the first side to come up with actual evidence for making them.

It's funny, really�or would be, if it weren't so sad. The best that Side A can come up with for Charles himself is to say, essentially, "Well, it's not so much what he says, as how he says it�well, okay, it's not how he says it either;" and for the commenters, to pick out examples of people making injudicious statements that are easy to take out of the context of a real, demonstrated outrage to which they're responding, or to point at a person daring to express that he thinks homosexuality is wrong (for example) because it says so in the Bible, and declare the place a "right-wing" cesspool of "racists" and "bigots" and "Nazis".

Racist/Prejudicial Hatred and Stereotyping of Islam at LGF:

Religion of Savagery
Religion of Market Bombs
Religion of Misogyny
Religion of High Explosives
Religion of Suicide Car Bombs
Religion of Beheadings
Religion of Slaughter
Religion of Car Bombs

Plenty more examples of right wing hatred can be found here

And a response from shortly later:

John:
Plenty more examples of right wing hatred

How is pointing out (well-documented, factual) instances of Islamist savagery an example of right-wing hatred?

Btw, thank you for that post. I don't think I could've made a more effective argument for the importance, validity, and value of LGF if I'd tried.

It's come to this, then: compiling documentation of real, actual outrages, with photos and direct quotes from quite mainstream sources, and pointing at them with a glowering expression�why, that's racism! And never mind the things he's actually pointing at; those are just "the way things are", or "our fault", or (as one self-described gay person explains why he doesn't care that Charles is, from the Islamists' perspective, on his side):

Regarding Islam. I'm an American who does not plan to travel overseas to flaunt my sexuality, so I could give two shits what Islamic countries are doing. I do know, however, that there is an American Taliban that wishes it could do the same to gays here. I'll fight my battles at home first.

Here, in a quite compact space, we've got the purest distillation of the grotesque contortions that concepts like "racism" and "bigotry" and "human rights" have undergone in recent years. Charles, who�though a casual familiarity with his history and motivations makes obvious that it's not even remotely necessary�is careful to never even accidentally make any public statement that could be construed as "racist" (much as these guys try to demonstrate that his sarcasm toward dissembling Islamists amounts to such), and who runs perhaps the only site dedicated to applying the most rigorous standards of volunteer journalism to the cause of staring with a cold and unblinking eye at the threat that made itself plain to us on 9/11/01, is the Left's pariah. He's no better than the neo-Nazi site that Google News has voluntarily listed, in their eyes. Never mind the incalculable service he's done these past years, shining a light on matters that the evening news prefers to keep hushed-up; his daring to do it in the first place makes him the target of death threats, slander, and�perhaps most galling of all in the world of blogdom, where reputation is one's most prized asset�a name one can hardly even speak in mixed company.

And opposed to him is a guy who thinks the boundaries of human rights and civil society should coincide with those of our own country, and outside them�well, it's just the rest of the world. Screw it.

There is simply something wrong with this. I'm not asking that Charles Johnson be made the subject of statuary or hoisted on a cheering throng's shoulders. I'm not denying that the things he points out can easily be construed as bearing exceedingly ill will toward a certain class of people (though that class is hardly, when the discussion comes down to brass tacks, one that I'd be willing to defend, as they're the ones wholeheartedly following the ideology that is LGF's explicit nemesis). All I'm doing is pointing out that if terms like "racist" or "Nazi" or even "right-wing" have come to be construed so broadly that Johnson falls into their orbit, then they've lost all meaning.

It's easy to see, once you've sifted through this whole avalanche of irrational hatred, how the logical progression works: Republicans (for some reason) are associated with racism. LGF points out repeated examples of atrocities committed by a group that looks like a race. Charles Johnson defends Bush and his policies in the War on Terror. Ergo, Johnson is a racist and LGF is a hate site. QED. (Oh, and Bush is Hitler.)

But starting from the thesis that most of the denizens of LGF�if you honestly follow their discussions, as few on the opposite side seem willing to do�are in fact former Lefties themselves, comprising every facet of society from white to black to male to female to gay to Jewish to Chinese to Cuban to even Arab, who have chosen to recognize the Islamofascist threat to all of them for what it is, and refuse to back down from pointing it out wherever it rears up just because it's not politically correct to do so... well, "race" itself becomes the reddest herring that I've ever pushed to the side of the plate. Race is completely irrelevant to me and (I submit) to the vast majority of LGFers. Ask 'em and they'll tell you, in style as much as in substance; you simply won't hear anyone rail on the way the people at Vanguard do, because they're the real deal. And LGF is about as different in spirit and in practice as it can be.

That's the tragedy that's unfolding here. People who frequent LGF aren't just not racists, they hate racists. It's one of the few things they do hate. And if that makes LGF a "hate" site, well... sign me up too, because the term is meaningless anyway.

UPDATE: Hey, welcome, lizardoid minions. Heh�"eloquent"? This is about as embarrassingly leaden as my prose has ever gotten. But still, thanks, and my pleasure.