So anyway, when I got pointed to this piece, I was caught pretty much flat-footed, especially by the following quote:
Their website contains advertisements for white supremacist militias and Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul).The website in question, and I went to check it out, has ads for Big Head Press, a Vin Suprynowicz book of some sort, some goldbug investment sites, and various other slightly wookie-suitish things that anybody who hangs around the more libertarianish corners of the web sees all the time.
This is "white supremacist militias"?
It seems that LGF is taking a page from the MSNBC playbook. Looks like Charles Johnson should schedule an appointment with his proctologist; he appears to be backed up badly enough to turn his eyes brown.
41 comments:
Go to Jihad Watch and pull up the posts concerning Robert Spencer's excommunication.
Chucky lost his marbles last year, basically.
They have "The Probability Broach" as a comicbook for free there too!
Or perhaps Charles Johnson got bit by a very common mistake: he thought that those ads were intentionally placed by the site owners, when in fact they were randomly inserted by some third-party advertiser. Such ads generally change every time the page is loaded. Some advertisers draw on cookies stored in the user's browser to decide which ads to show.
Which means that one should wonder what sort of website would allow white-supremacist ads, and what sort of advertiser would have them in its rotations.
LGF has changed considerably from what it once was -- not always for the better, nor for the worse -- but that's no reason to accuse Johnson of hallucinating.
I've noticed that he's gone a bit wonky lately. Guess he's trying for conservative-light.
"LGF has changed considerably from what it once was -- not always for the better, nor for the worse -- but that's no reason to accuse Johnson of hallucinating."
Okay, how about calling Paulbots a "hate group"?
That would be like calling D&D players a "militia".
I will remind your good readers that the KKK were socialists, as are the vast majority of today's white supremacists and black supremacists. If the Left is going to toss around charges of "racism" then they should always get a bit more in return than they can handle.
A friend of mine knew the clan culture from down Southaways, and he quoted one of them as saying "no self-respecting Clansman would ever vote Republican." It's not terribly hard to understand given that Lincoln and Grant were Republicans.
Next time a feces-throwing Leftist yells "racist!" you can treat them to a little dose of reality. Or a big one. - Lyle
Thank-you Lyle!
Wolfwalker: Read the Johnson-Spenser email exchanges, and then get back to me.
Chuck has gone loony-toons.
Looking at their news links, they do seem to have more than a whiff of fascination with things Nazi, and of militias and conspiracies.
But nothing was overt.
Well, hardcore Paulbots and conspiracy theories go together like peanut butter and jelly, but just because somebody thought a UFO alien was paid by the Trilateral Commission to shoot JFK from the grassy knoll doesn't make them a nazi, or even particularly unusual, to judge by the programming on the History Channel.
Uh-oh, they're harping on "Viper Militia" and invoking a bombastic and thin TPM-Muckraker article to further badger the Wookies with claims of "Heavily Armed 90's Militia," and "illegal automatic weapons in the desert," (oh my!) - except that Class III in AZ is the diggidy shniz -?
Someone tries to talk rationally about Wookies and Charles shows up to say, "Another sleeper shows up to defend these raving kooks."
I do think LGF has blown a logic circuit especially in that which they chose as a supporting "document." And after further responses, put a fork in 'em, he's done. Sad.
Wow, I googled "lgf charles johnson crazy" and it looks like I missed all the fun. Witeups at Kos and Gawker, a flamefest in Freeperland, a public televised hair-pulling feud with Glenn Beck... This is good stuff!
Kristopher is right. I hardly ever went there, but Ace and the fellow contributors there have been noticing Charles' derailment for some time. Apparently Charles delinked Ace, and bans anyone who disagrees with him.
No loss, AFAIC.
And Charles is just getting too full of himself there.
I got kicked off for saying, essentially, lets calm down and take a breath, after some rant of his...
That was deemed a 'personal attack'.
OK, Alpha-Mike-Foxtrot, chuckles....
Poor Wookies. I'm not getting the feeling that Charles owns any guns whatsoever. He seems to maintain the usual Californian emotion-driven fear-based views that I once held as a typical CA artist-community lefty.
You guys have ruined me. :-)
I don't browse there more than maybe 5 minutes a month, if that, but I've noticed a definite trend toward what I call the "woo-EEE-ooo" factor since at least last fall.
Shiny side in, please...shiny side in.
heh. WV=scrones.
Regards,
Rabbit.
Wow. They certainly are painting with a rather broad brush over there... Granted, the Freedom's Phoenix folks are a little towards the fringish side of the house, but they are not exactly full-bore whackos either.
But, hey, when all else fails, demonize the messenger when the message is too hard ot attack.
In other news, I do not appear to have missed much from not visiting LGF ever before...
LGF has been on my short list of daily blogstops for the last 4 years or so, and in my opinion it's gone severely downhill for a few reasons:
1) Rabid pounding of the anti-ID/pro-Evolution drum. I'm all about pointing out the logical fallacies of ID, and all about making people aware that it's not science, but just because someone leans in that direction does not make them a scumbag idiot doo-doo head in my book. I reserve that for people that believe in anthropogenic climate change. :)
2) Fake-moderate conservatism. In his rush to not offend anyone in the center, Mr. LGF seems all to willing to offend everyone even vaguely to the right. Seems to me like he'd be much more comfortable with a Bill Clinton 3rd term than a George Bush 3rd term. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how I see it.
3) I don't really have a three. I kinda jumbled three up into two.
Nowadays I find more value in his top ten links section than I do in his own content.
I'll periodically link to something of his because of a convergence of topic interest and the fact that Mr. Johnson seemingly has more time to devote to pursueing said interest. That said, I don't cess in his pool (and probably shouldn't be "helping" the chef here either) so I can't say what goes on behind the curtains.
It's been steadily more painfully obvious over the past year or so that he has little to no tolerance with socio-political views that don't align with his personal PC viewpoint (see: Gates of Vienna blog and the European right-wing political groups or his on-going demonization of the admittedly more-than-a-little-overboard Pamela Gellor as examples). Charles Johnson's eagerness to disparage and dismiss any pol or commentator that doesn't comport to his standard of propriety is becoming tiresome also.
Still, he links to a sufficently diverse selection of sites and topics to be worth a quick pan through the day's page IMO.
Every website with a hitrate above a certain level eventually turns into the Daily Kos, just like every cassette left in a car eventually turns into Queen's Greatest Hits.
White supremacist, birther, racist, wealthy, Fascist, rascist, religious right, creationist, Nazi, hompohobe, gunhugger, militia, Republican, basher, executive, they all have the same definition-
someone with whom the leftist speaking disagrees.
These are all terms of a religious faith, like "sin" or "salvation". Donb't look for consistent or rational definition, hurling the words is the performance of the sacrament.
Og, I have Queen's Greatest Hits on CD . . . and Itunes. My cassettes stay put.
And I wouldn't want to be judged by my ads . . . at Examiner, they always seem to be either "Learn to kill 15 guys with your bare hands from Master X!" or "Have you ever considered that the reason you hate yourself and your family so much is that you have never opened your mind to Scientology?"
wolfwalker -
A second wonderment: If the third party advertiser is drawing on cookies stored on the user's browser to determine which ads to show (which I agree they in fact do), what does that say about the kinds of websites Mr. Johnson has been perusing lately in order for said cookies to end up on his computer?
... just like every cassette left in a car eventually turns into Queen's Greatest Hits.
And what is wrong with Queen's Greatest Hits (beyond the inevitable subjectivity of it all)?
Mostly asked for the word verification: lasts
FWIW, I cleared my cookies a couple of times while refreshing the site in question and never turned up Nazis...
Also a valid question, Steve. But an easily-answered one. There are two kinds of people who visit racist/supremacist sites ... or creationist sites, or anti-vaxer sites, or nutroot-left sites, or indeed sites of any specific political persuasion. One kind is people who agree with the views provided on those sites. The other kind is people who emphatically oppose the views provided, and are obeying Sun-tzu's dictum: "Those who know the enemy as well as they know themselves will never suffer defeat."
I think it's pretty safe to say that in this case, for this type of site, Johnson belongs to the second group. He's got a lot of faults, but I've never heard any rational being accuse him of being a racist or white-supremacist.
Tam: Is "Cleared my cookies" code for something?
I still like his taste in jazz but I removed him from "My Informants" a while ago as his critical edge went dull.
It's funny you should mention this. I just got banned there last night. I mentioned how much LGF has changed and for suggested that exercising your right to open carry wasn't bad because it might "scare people". Then again I did suggest that Charles Johnson's commenters were engaging in an intellectual jerk d'circle. I think I got off 4 posts before the mighty lizard himself dropped the ban hammer on me.
It's changed a lot from the place I used to post at in 2002-2003.
Wow! Staghounds, can I quote you? Succint to a fault.
And yes, I too have a copy of Queen's Greatest somewhere back in the boot. It's an SUV, I can say boot without affect.
Actually, last time I looked, I was rather heavily hetero, but Freddie Mercury quite redeemed himself in my eyes with his deathbed speech, the one about individual responsibility and personal choice.
The poofter thing strikes me as an illogical waste, but doesn't seem to be an impediment to class.
Anyway, I barely know anything about Ron Paul. I read a few silly things atrributed to him, checked to see if they were true, and when I discovered they were, wrote him off.
I don't know diddly about all the whack-job sites being mentioned, and probably won't waste more than a dozen or so minutes this weekend checking them out, but I did go to the Big-Head site, and read the Roswell comic. It was really cute, done by someone with a dry sense of humor and a knowledge of weapons, old movies, and aircraft.
High art? Not hardly. But fun. And all the Nazis got their butts kicked.
Y'know, I'm a pro-choice atheist and yet I still think Charles Johnson is a wanker. Does this mean he'd preemptively ban me from his little circle of nut-huggers?
Dammit Tammy, now I have to find out who Charles Johnson is. Not fair, I wanted to go to sleep.
Charles Johnson is free to do what he wants with his blog.
IMHO he's gone completely around the bend. He's chasing after BS that has little to no bearing on issues that have far more import on events in this country. Also, he's weeded out dissent of any kind and the place has turned into an echo chamber.
Damn shame too, used to be a place where you could go to get information that was useful, now ... not so much.
Gmac
Og: I think a copy of "Queen's Greatest Hits" is always a good omen.
I thought that post at LGF was a bit over the top, meself, after having looked at the site in question, but then again, I am one of those Wookiee-suited Rondroids. :D
I used to read LGF twice a day. Then he turned on a website I read 4-5 times a day, JihadWatch.Org, and I got fed up with it. After he started accusing Robert Spencer of being a white supremacist, a fascist, etc., I just stopped attending. Johnson has lost his marbles several times and accidentally collected a few leftist marbles from Wonkette in the process.
Thanks for putting this up, Tam. I'd been thinking about removing LGF from my links for a while, and it's nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks Charles has lost it.
I went to LGF daily my first three years at college; then I got back after summer break and noticed a definite change in tone (baseless accusations and specious assumptions) and haven't been back since.
It was never Queen's Greatest Hits in my family; our cassettes always turned into Chicago 9 (the version with the truncated ending to "Make Me Smile"). Also the Wright Brothers, but I think that's a regional thing.
Yes, Johnson has quit the right side of the political blogosphere, even attempting to sit on the fence on the topic of "Climate Change".
However, and this is a big however, y'all need to go back and watch the video again and scroll a bit through the website.
Other items from the website include:
9/11 was an Inside Job (Troofers)
Vaccines = Poison (uh, what?)
Alex F*ckin' Jones (emperor of the whackoloons)
The moon landing was faked (ain't that lovely?)
And anytime they post about LEO's they label them NAZI's (in capital letters, for some odd reason)
Sorry, these guys are whacked out of their damn skulls and we need to take the win from MSNBC cropping the footage and let these bozos go on their merry way.
And DirtCrashr, I love ya man, but the Class III's weren't what the Vipers went up the river for. They had intricate plans to do what McVeigh did to OKC, except to the the Phoenix offices of the FBI, ATF, IRS, Treasury, the Phoneix PD and the AZ National Guard. These plans included placing smaller anti-personnel devices (which they already had built) to take out the first responders.
They all plead guilty to various conspiracy, explosives and unregistered weapons charges.
While I admire their spunk, their intentions would have murdered our ability to be where we are today with our gun rights.
I'm not sure that Charles was ever that much on the "right," except in comparison to the looney leftists and internationalist progressives who were so vocal in their America-blaming after 9/11.
I see Charles as more of a Moynihan liberal who, now that he's cut off from (and rejected by) the Democrats, is trying to remake the conservative side into a place more to his liking.
In the process, he's (largely) lost track of who his (our) enemies are, and like a number of strongly-secular (read atheist) libertarians, seems to now fear Christian fundamentalists almost as much as he does the radical Islamists. Perhaps that was always the case, but in the last couple of years his interest has shifted. [example] Unfortunately, his judgment isn't all that good: Because he's not "a person of the right," he has trouble separating the right's harmless nuts from the really dangerous.
Then there are his philosophical hot buttons: Evolution, abortion, and gay marriage (which again put him with the secular libertarians). These issues used to be mostly ignored, but nowadays generate a lot of posts.
All of which have made LGF less of a must-read for me.
Charles is also under the impression that not only is Osama Bin Laden dead but that the US government (under Bush and Obama) are suppressing this information for their own benefit.
Yet he rails against conspiracy theorists...
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