LGF: Like Flypaper to Sociopaths [1]

Gee, and I thought the real problem with US politics is that “the sheer intensity of feeling exceeded the real political distance by a very long way”.

Clearly there are no waters in Casablanca.

Golly, you’re right, Mandarin. A mistake of that magnitude and realizing one has made a mistake and doing everything one can to rectify that mistake totally excuses death threats and threats against children and posting personal information to facilitate those threats. Thank you for being so honest as to point out that there are two sides to every story.

Mandarin, I just skimmed through Cramer’s very long post about mercenaries. And?… there was nothing there to see, in terms of shocking and offensive matter. The Janet Jackson nipple moment had more frisson.
If she had sad she wanted mercenaries stewed and eaten, that’s her biz, really. The idea of sending people over to link her site to some porno site seems to be one of those completely brilliant ideas the Delts come up with at 2 in the morning after the vodka and the bongs.
So what is your problem?

Mandarin – are you _really_ saying that it’s dishonest not to provide some broader context to threats to a blogger’s children? You should be ashamed of yourself.

‘But I notice that you too are unwilling to state what Cramer did. Why is that’
Now I’d like to know as well, cause I don’t know, how will I ever be sure whether or not her and her kids should be killed if I don’t know what she said?

If only there were some sort of philosophical guidelines that could tell me when it is appropriate to kill a woman and her offspring for making a comment I disagree with. But alas this is one of those sticky situations for which Western Civilization has provided us with absolutely no resolution.

You know I’m betting that CT’s reluctance to tell us what it is indicates that in fact she should be killed.

Of course I appreciate that mandarin pointed out exactly what the whole brouhaha was over, so that I could see that in fact death threats etc. were completely justified by the only truly good and manly gentlemen now in existence upon our poor benighted sphere, I speak of course of LGF’s contingent of latter-day knights, of which I am afraid mandarin is perhaps not testicularly well-endowed enough to be a member even if capable of defending their righteous actions by suggesting (trolling) that there is probably justification for death threats in this particular situation (and i ask you, when is not a good time for death threats?).

Of course it could be that the academically secluded members of CT, who just don’t understand about the need to kill people who say stuff that is bad and then apologize about it, might have incorrectly believed that this whole thing was so well-known across the whole blogosphere that tediously going over it once again would be a waste of bandwidth but also felt that there was still some moral need to point out that LGF are fasicst pieces of shit.

Nahhh.

(Roger, don’t waste your time searching for the original provocation. Cramer deleted it, and a quantity of related material, from her site. Anyway, Henry is going to tell us what really happened. Any minute now.)

“But yes, Henry, I am saying that you are dishonest not to tell your readers what Cramer did to spark the conflagration. You want them to believe that one side (your anti-war, anti-American side) is completely in the right while the other side is completely in the wrong.”

What exactly is it that you want Mandarin? I followed Henry’s links and was easily able to find out what led to the abusive behaviour against Cramer, and her subsequent apology. Nothing is being concealed here at CT. By your ‘logic’, it would be even more ‘dishonest’ not to have written about the whole sorry episode at all.

Since when is it dishonest to link to something rather than re-hashing the entire episode? Bloggers typically link to something and comment on it – that’s the magic of hypertext. So what’s your problem?

I find it extraordinary that your twisted sense of morality finds sudden outrage at a standard blogging practice, and utterly fails to condemn death threats. Grow up.

Ah, the comments crashed in my first burst of righteous indignation but seemed to have saved it anyway.

There you go, two fraternal defenses for the price of one.

I’m not very convinced, I must say.

Lets say Kathryn Cramer did get death threets from people reading LGF. How is this Charles Johnson’s fault? Sure, Johnson criticized her. In very harsh terms. He wrote that she was sick; that she was a loon; that her post was “a disgusting exercise in moral bankrupcy.”

Does any of this amount to asking people to sne her death threats?

I’ve criticized Bush using similar terms on my blog. Does this mean its my fault if one of my readers decides to attack Dubya? It sounds like something conceived by John Ashcroft.

To get back on topic a little, I would say that there is a method to mandarin’s madness. Do not let your contempt for him blind you to his dangerousness.

Nor the danger of the Charles Johnsons who inflame while understanding well the legal definition of incitement.

shorter Mandarin: the existence of Hyperlinking has led to a common mode of operation that allows me to feel morally superior to everyone that operates in said common mode.

Sorry guys, but I’m with Mandarin on this one. If we are to abhor what LGF’s minions have done (which I haven’t been able to discover firsthand, but, knowing Charles Johnson’s rabble-rousing, I can imagine) the very least we could know is the context. I am unfamiliar with Kathryn Cramer’s blog and, despite my efforts (not helped by the deletion of evidence), I haven’t been able to get a clear picture of what she did. Absent links that will provide it, or some explanation here, this comment adds up to a very uncomfortable exercise.

I didn’t want to talk about Cramer’s post, precisely in order to stop this degenerating into a he-said, she-said thing, but Peter Cuthbertson’s summary is deliberately disingenuous. Cramer didn’t “call one of them a neo-Nazi” – she said that one of the contracters had the same name as a neo-Nazi, and that they _could_ be the same guy – she’d tried to compare photographs, but couldn’t reach a conclusion. In her original post, she said that if they weren’t, she would apologize profusely. When she found out that they weren’t the same guy, she _did_ apologize profusely. I’ve been reading Kathryn’s blog for a long time – she’s evidently a deeply sincere person, who wrote a post that many people could reasonably have found offensive. But that’s not the issue that I wanted to blog about (see further below).

Charles Johnson has created what can only be described as a hate-site, where vicious racism and eliminationism are tolerated and implicitly encouraged among his commenters. When he makes a post like that, he knows damn well what the consequence is going to be. Cuthbertson notably fails to mention that Johnson’s post “urging his readers to be polite at her site” post-dates the death threats etc by a considerable period, and also describes Kathryn as an “evil woman.” It’s clearly a post-hoc exercise in limiting any possible legal or other consequences rather than a sincere effort to behave “responsibly.”

But all of this is beside the point. Mandarin – you seem to see this in terms of a greater exercise in point scoring between left and right. I didn’t say anything in the post about LGF as a representative of the right, and for good reason. I don’t see it as representative of the right. It’s an extremist hate site. If you see it as being part of the right that you want to defend, then that says quite a lot about you. In the end it boils down to a simple set of issues. I think that threats to someone’s children are fundamentally wrong. You argue that they should be put in context. I think that it’s a black and white issue. You see it in shades of gray. Clearly we inhabit different moral universes – I suspect that argument between us is a waste of time, and don’t intend to engage in it any more.

In response to mandarin and peter: like henry pointed out, the “criticise her” part is a huge understatement. And no matter how you may think Cramer’s earlier post was “idiotic”, putting her assumptions, which she acknowledged as mere assumptions and later recanted, on a par with death threats against her and minimising these as simply “idiotic” is … how can you call it, odd? strange? warped reasoning?

Death threats are an offence, and online abuse of that kind is expressely forbidden by all internet providers. Assumptions even of the most tenuous kind and opinions of even the most objectionable kind about political events are not.

See if you can grasp that difference. Not to mention from an ethical and not just legal point of view.

And then explain to me how responsible it is to start a witch hunt against someone just because they happened to say something that offended your delicate political sensibilities.

What maria said applies even to that comment by kos. I can find it as ugly and stupid as anyone else, but no matter what he wrote, when people start sending him threats they’re the ones who stepped out of line.

Why do people who are so ready to incite this kind of mob lynch behaviour even bother to discuss politics if they can’t stand the fact that other people may have different opinions and strong ones too?

Why do they react in such absurd hyperbolic ways to objectionable stuff, but are so ready to justify the most outrageously objectionable crap they themselves do and write?

The one thing I gather from all this is that blind adoration of someone, blogger or politician or anything, is directly proportional to the size of their ego and their capacity to find excuses for everything they do. (“Start a witch hunt, who, me? I only started a discussion with my notoriously moderate and rational contributors about how much of an evil disgusting loon she is. I didn’t start no death threats. I don’t even control the comment section on my site. I’m so popular, I have, like, 3000 comments a day, how am I supposed to set any standard there? You’re just envious. Besides, do you see that disclaimer? right there, it says I wash my hands of anything that’s written on my website unless I write it myself, and that you can never tell what I endorse or not. The fact that what I write is 1/1000th of what’s on my website is irrelevant, of course. I’m still not responsible for anything that gets posted there or for the direction discussions take. If people choose to interpret “evil” and “loon” as “deserving abuse and death threats”, well, I can’t do anything about it. It’s the price of popularity. You can’t hold that against me. I can’t be accountable for the consequences of my blinding brilliance. In fact, I so resent being at the center of these blogging controversies because it brings me even more popularity and with that comes even less responsibility and dammit, I don’t really like not being responsible because it clashes with all my ideals, but it’s not my fault… “)

Rajeev – I think you’re misunderstanding both Mandarin’s original post and my response here. Mandarin wasn’t simply asking for more context in a neutral fashion, trying to understand the origins of the phenomenon as your inquirers into the origins of Nazism would be doing. He/she was saying that I was being dishonest for not providing it. If you really wanted to draw out the analogy you’re making, which is an extreme one, the equivalent would be someone who accused a historian of Nazism of being dishonest for not explicitly referring to some form of previous bad behavior on the part of Jews (I note for careless readers that I’m emphatically _not_ accusing Mandarin of anti-Semitism here – I’m responding to the specific analogy that you put forward, not to Mandarin’s original posts).

It’s also quite clear that Mandarin interprets my post as being an attack on him/her, and people who he/she agrees with, an effort to make people “believe that one side (your anti-war, anti-American side) is completely in the right while the other side is completely in the wrong.” Again, the analogy is not with someone who seeks to defend a deplorable cause from attacks that he feels are unwarranted. It’s with someone who wants to defend a deplorable cause that he identifies as tangled up with his or her own. Mandarin interprets this post as an attempt to discredit the pro-war pro-American right (ignoring the fact that I start the post with a nod to Julian Sanchez – dunno what his position on the war is, but he’s a patriotic card-carrying libertarian). The fact that Mandarin sees LGF as part and parcel of his “side” is surely a significant datum. If I perceived a verbal attack on North Korea as being an attack on my part of the left, then I would be saying something important about my political leanings (and willingness to excuse horrific dictatorships). It would be a different matter if I challenged a claim that North Korea was in some sense representative of the left – which I would do without hesitation. However, in the matter at hand, I did not at any point say that LGF was representative of the right, or the anti-war side.

I can understand – and directly sympathize with – the principles of reasoned debate that you’re trying to defend, but I’m quite sure that they don’t apply here.

Gareth wrote:

Peter misstates what Kos said. He didn’t express pleasure in the death of Americans in Iraq. He expressed (and later apologized for) indifference to the death of mercenaries in Iraq at the hands of an enraged local population.

Saying “screw them” is quite a bit more vapid than one would expect from mere indifference.

(I won’t apologize for “diverting” this thread. Publishing someone’s home phone number, knowing that one’s audience consists of mentally imbalanced fascists, is a crime, not a debatable blogging talking point.)

We do not appear to know that any such thing happened and we only have the word of someone who falsely intimated that one of the contractors was a neo-Nazi and later deleted her own offending post.

“In summary, a handful of idiots on the internet got into a fight.”
This an odd way to refer to someone (and their children) receiving death threats, and does not inspire respect for the writer (Peter Cuthbertson). I shall hope for better.

Grr. Grr. Whuf! Whuf!

Shorter Mandarin:

“How dare you give me the fight I’m spoiling for!?”

I cite Peter Cuthpertson:
“4. A “small number” [her words] of excitable idiots send death threats to silly left-wing blogger in response.”
Do your 15-second research, Thorley, and you won’t look like such a schmuck. Here at least.

I apologize to the group for the “moron” retort. I should not have brought myself down to the level of the other individual. If he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting a civilized person that is his problem but it does not give me license to do the same.

I’m really amazed at how generous the commenters here have been to Mandarin. Even aside from the merits of his (her?) argument–I don’t really see that there are any, though I can understand a reaction of “Well, since Henry didn’t provide the details of what happened, I’m not going to jump to any conclusions until I hear more”–I would think that his style would lead everyone to ignore him as a troll from moment one. Quoting from his first three posts in this thread:

05:39 am: “Henry, let me ask you a question I wouldn’t have to ask an honest person”
06:02 am: “Kip, I like your reasoning. It fits in very well here at Crooked Timber.” (In context, clearly an ad hominem attack; if you don’t believe me, scroll up and judge for yourself.)
12:42 pm: “I was pretty certain that this thread would devolve into ridiculous slurs, and I haven’t been disappointed.”

The first of these was entirely unprovoked; the second was a reaction to a comment that took issue with the substance of Mandarin’s comments but said nothing whatsoever about Mandarin himself/herself. After number 3, what, exactly, leads anyone else to think he/she is worth responding to?

Good luck, Thorley.

Moral arguments get their valence from goals, stated or unstated, masked or plain.
Success can be hard to determine when the goal is vague, abstract, and distant.
Wanting your family to be secure and well-fed is easier to measure as an achieved/unachieved goal than wanting those same things for everyone.
–
What’s the goal of Charles Johnson?
Of Muqtada al-Sadr?
Of Ariel Sharon?
Of Henry Farrell?
Of Kathryn Cramer?
Don’t we act toward goals in moral debate?
The feral dog-pack that Johnson sets loose doesn’t. They’re sadistic voyeurs, denied catharsis most of the time. Hungry and blindly reactive.
There’s a tacit neutrality behind the papparazzi rationale. That the images they capture and reproduce are in and of the polis, a shared communal space.
The cunning result is a hampering dangerous force that seems to have no master, though it serves one, and well.
What stymies too many decent people is the quandary of allowing the participation of destructive individuals and groups in democratic processes.
This is a fundamental question that goes unanswered except locally, and its local solutions are almost always force, as opposed to reasoned persuasion.
Being forcibly kicked off a thread for nastiness isn’t a democratic thing.
The tolerant suffer the presence of the intolerant, and suffer from the actions of the intolerant, and the results of those actions.
Where’s the gain? Is it worth it?
Or is it only that there’s no other way through?

Hmmm, I thought the Kos comments were clearly outrageous, and I have been to LGF at most twice, and never participated in the comments. Mark A.R. Kleinman didn’t like them either, and he doesn’t strike me as a regular LGF reader. Hmm.

I donno, folks. We just got into it with the LGF crowd over at WoC, and nary a death-threat has crossed my mailbox.

Then again, I didn’t call them mouth-breathers, either.

Amusingly enough, the only thing I’ve ever recieved that could be considered a threat came from someone to the 52

Carlos 04.09.04 at 5:12 am

A.L. I think there are probably two very clear reasons why you have not received any LGF death threats:
1. you’re not a woman
2. your first name is “Armed”

More on the LGF-being-a-hate-site issue:

No, calling the Arab world uncivilized does not constitute hate speech. Nor does criticizing the tendency to believe the best about Islam. After all: Islam seems to have a near-monopoly on *global* terror. A disproportionate share of terrorists are Muslims — and all the 9/11 hijackers were certainly driven by Islamic fantacism. Pointing this out — like LGF does — is not hate speech. It does not incite violence.

Detached,
Charles Johnson apparently actively monitors his comments; last I looked there was a comment about banning someone for posting under two names, with (justified) indignation about the fact that one of them was Jewish; and I’ve heard that he deletes anything that he thinks is anti-Semitic. That means that he doesn’t think that advocacy of genocide against Palestinians is worthy of deletion or banning. The “I didn’t write it, it’s just posted on my site” defense won’t work there.
Anyway, if you posted a bunch of reasoned criticism of Israel, and your comments became filled with things that were indistinguishable from statements of the Nazis, don’t you think it would be a sign to check yourself or at least forcefully state that you were opposed to such garbage?
Sebastian–
I don’t think anyone is talking about you. Henry said “Some of the outrage,” not all of it.

The cached link, above, was apparently taken before the post was edited for an apology. All I can say is that I saw the edited version, complete with lengthy apology, with my own two eyes, but didn’t save a copy for myself.

Ys, dd vryn ntc tht my lst pst bv hs bn rndrd nrdbl? Dsn’t mk Hnry ny mr hnst — lss, pssbly.

bq. Disemvowellment is so much more satisfying than mere deletion.

Indeed, I’ve nicked Teresa’s policing methods (met her for the first time last week – she’s every bit as nice as you might imagine). It’s not only more satisfying than deleting, it serves as a class of a shot across the bows. I’ve some tolerance for rudeness, but after a while it gets boring, especially when it isn’t being used to convey a point. If Mandarin starts playing nice again, he/she will stop being disemvowelled when he/she comments on my posts. If he/she doesn’t want to, that’s his/her problem (CT is our playground – we set the rules).

Unmitigated 24 carat firebreathing trolls, like the anti-Semite who was hanging around a few weeks ago, can expect to get their comments deleted completely and immediately, without mercy. Different problem, different solution.

LGF is one of the worst sites I have ever seen. Even websites that can be considered “Nazi,” do not spew the level of hate LGF does. e.g. I have never heard a Nazi rejoice in the deaths of Jewish kids for instance, whereas I have read posters at LGF rejoicing in the deaths by incineration of Palestinian children; laughing about IDF thugs with flamethrowers and calling it a “turkey shoot.” I am an anti-Zionist Jew, and it is rabid Zionists like Charles that is going to bring another Shoah down on the rest of us. May God help us.

I am an anti-Zionist Jew, and it is rabid Zionists like Charles that is going to bring another Shoah down on the rest of us.

Anti-zionist, was the first Shoah the fault of the Jews? Was it their bad behavior that brought it on?

If another Shoah occurs, I kind of think the countries in which the media and the clergy spew hatred of an intensity before which Hitler himself would feel obliged to kneel in awe might have something to do with it.

Like flypaper to anti-ahem-Zionists. Once again a comment by Henry degenerates into an exercise of cherchez le Juif.

LGF weren’t the only yellow slime to jump all over this. Dumb little Michele Catalano hopped on the bandwagon for a while, then deleted HER inflammatory post on her weblog when she was confronted about what was happening at Cramer’s site. Now Catalano seems to be having some sort of crisis involving “medication” and is blaming that for her behavior problems over the last several days. No word yet on what the brave Charlie Johnson’s excuse was, unless he was on the rag.

Go figger. They all look like nutjob wingnuts from here. And it all backfired pretty severely on them.

Bring it into the light.
Cleanse it with truth.
Answer the questions.

Is this guy for real? Is this the crowd Crooked Timber is now attracting?

“Islam seems to have a near-monopoly on global terror. A disproportionate share of terrorists are Muslims…”

This turns out not to be true. You may be interested in reading the State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002. I call your attention, in particular, to Appendix H.

And the idea that I have to insistently repeat my admiration for people like Naomi Klein and Seymour Hersh, and Krugman, and Chomsky, and many others, who are Jews

Some of your “best friends”, are they?

…I’ve publicly embarrassed myself to a degree that won’t permit any further participation in an open forum…

Nah, don’t let pesky facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory. He once worked under Henry Kissinger, didn’t he? Makes him an honorary Jew, at the very least!

batterup-
Well it’s not like I can’t be sarcastic, it’s more that we seem to be moving directly and rapidly toward nuclear holocaust, and that seems serious to me, inasmuch as it will probably bring about the extinction of the human race. But hey, there’s always Mars or something, right? Or maybe Venus.
–
It’s been pretty obvious for a while now that there’s more to the phrase “conspiracy theory” than just sensible irritation at paranoid monologists. The way it now describes its own negative seems almost intentional.
There are no conspiracies right? Only bizarre suspicions without substance. “Conspiracy theory” means no conspiracy took place.
That’s a fascinating trick, how that happened.
–
Putting Bremer under Kissinger’s blood-soaked wing is hardly a defense of his moral character, whatever it says about his participation in plots, non-existent or otherwise.
I can’t think of a good sarcastic way to convey this so I’ll say it straight, I really don’t care about Bremer’s ancestry or religion. It’s his affinity to what’s bringing us closer by the day to the aforementioned nuclear fesitivities.
Really. Really really really. Seriously really.
But ok, in a sort of sarcastic vein, though it’s true, Tommy Franks? He of the drive to Baghdad? Yep.
I could make a really long list of Jewish people that matter greatly to me, personally and culturally, (Lenny Bruce, George Steiner, Bob Dylan, a girl named Rosenthal…) but I don’t think it would register with you, I don’t think it matters, to you.
What matters to me is I’m neither a racist anti-Semite, nor a knee-jerk liberal, nor a rabid conservative, nor a timid academic…let’s see, did I leave one out?
Because that’s pretty much it for the acceptable positions isn’t it?
Suggesting that Bremer’s where he is for reasons that go beyond his diplomatic qualifications is a kind of heresy, and can’t be permitted, can it?
–
Just to make it easier for you:
I’m saying-
1. The US is in Iraq to benefit Israel.
2. Iraq has been intentionally destabilized.
3. Bremer was placed in his position intentionally, out of vindictive spite.

Also, I’m working toward saying that this sociopathic manipulation bids fair to destroy us all, or maybe I already said that.
–
It is possible to hold these opinions and not be anti-Semitic, I know because here I am, holding them, and not being anti-Semitic.
I’m sorry if that makes you unhappy.

msg – “If he is, there’s a question here that needs to be addressed, immediately.”

Um, why? why would it matter if Bremer was a Jew?

No one seems to bother about that question _in Iraq_ itself, so, if your idea was they put a Jew there only to spite the Iraqis because Iraqis are supposed to hate Jews like all Arabs do, then please do show where that has been raised as issue other than by yourself.

Seems to me those against the American presence are against the American presence full stop. Bremer being a part of that so whether he’s a Jew or not would be completely irrelevant, even to terrorists, let alone the ordinary Iraqi population – who maybe aren’t all the obsessive Jew-haters you imagine them to be? Some of them are even working with Bremer and co. to reorganise Iraq, you know that? You know they’re not all terrorists and kidnappers?

or did you just want to line up one racist cliché after the other? if so, congratulations…

All of these “links” are coming from the same people who claimed there was a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

… what?

“Following the Israeli incursion into Jenin earlier this year, Paul Collinson, a British explosives expert working with the Red Cross, identified hundreds of explosive devices found there and noted that ‘the pipe bombs I found in Jenin are exact replicas of ones I found in Northern Ireland.'”

That’s a Red Cross worker; the Red Cross is not typically seen as a neocon organization.

“A more recent report, published in May by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, identified Hezbollah, Hamas, and a number of other Middle Eastern terrorist organizations as active in Colombia and the Triborder Region (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela).”

That’s the Library of Congress, also not a typically neocon organization.

My second link pulls together a lot of the information; it’s a piece published by the non-partisan Center for Defense Intelligence. The CDI often criticizes the US. In fact, they’ve published articles critical of the war in Iraq, like the one I just linked to.

The eta will be satisfied if the basques are given independence; the Islamic radicals will never be satisfied until they’ve established another caliphate encompassing parts of the western world. Is it really so irrational to focus more on the latter and not so much on the former?

Yeah, it is. Motive doesn’t much matter to the people who get killed. We shouldn’t ignore big threats because they’re limited to one geographic area.

This “global” distinction doesn’t really have much meaning, I’m afraid, even if you were right in saying all the global terrorists are Muslims. The key metric is very simple: does group X have the ability to carry out its plans, and do those plans involve terrorism? “We didn’t focus on them because they only want their own country back” is faint comfort to the families of those who die in “non-global” terrorism.

mc-
“No one seems to bother about that question in Iraq itself…”
The prospect of trying to forge a reply to a world-view so schizophrenically divorced from reality is too disheartening.
At some point the diminishing returns of arguing this stop outweighing any possible benefit.
You’ve heard me, and so have others; it’s enough.
And I have no doubt that I’m the only person you’ve heard raise the issues I’ve raised.
It’s in your favor that the same conditions are probably what caused you to publicly deliver an absurdity like the one quoted above.
To continue this debate at this level would damage more than it would heal.