From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sat Aug 02 2003 - 22:18:10 MDT
It is high past time for me to reply to Hermit's continued
cavalcade of calumnies directed at me, and so now I shall.
First, he accuses me of plagiarism, and then accuses me of
flooding the 'Serious Business' section of the BBS with biased
reportage. The funny thing is that he did not complain about himself
when he was doing it. In fact, he almost filled the first 12 pages of the
"Current News" thread with a deluge of stories from such 'objective'
sources as the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the
Progressive, Znet, the Yellow News, and so on, by such 'unbiased'
authors as Robert Fisk (whose serial inaccuracies have become so
legendary on the Net that they have spawned the neologism 'fisking',
which means a point-by-point factual rebuttal), John Pilger, Noam
Chomsky, Edward Said, and others of this ilk. he did so with only
minimal commentary, mostly reserved to highlighting passages or
interjecting gratuitous and vicious mal mots. When I attempted to
discuss some of the blatant fallacies there included, he curtly replied
with the following (on page 13):
In future, would posters please use one of the existing "Serious
Business" threads, or begin a new thread under "Serious Business"
to hold discussions of news articles, rather than posting to
"Current News".
Discussion - as opposed to news - posted to this thread will in
future be removed, as it reduces the value of the current news
thread.
Thank-you for your cooperation.
So I cooperated, and did precisely what he asked. But
that, too, was surpassingly more than he could stomach.
Apparently, having any opinion appear that is not a clone of his,
however wrong his has proven to be (and it has been proven
wrong all the way from Afghanistan to Iraq), was exceedingly
offensive to him, and he wants it STOPPED. By all means at his
totalitarian-minded disposal.
To post , largely without commentary, biased stories from
slanted sources was obviously OK as long as HE was doing it, but
obvoiusly, when someone (read me) began posting far different
perspectives from much more respected sources, such as Foreign
Affairs Magazine, Policy Review Magazine, Foreign Policy
Magazine, the Wilson Quarterly, the Atlantic Monthly, the New
Yprker, and so on, it was not OK with him. He started labeling
what he had previously been doing himself 'plagiarism', even
though a simple Google search was sufficient to find the author
and source, and 'list flooding', even though he had been doing the
same thing himself, but was unable to find as many fringe sources
that agreed with his erroneous take on the issues as I found
mainstream, widely respected sources that pointed out the errors
of the others and set the record straight. And what was then
wrong with the picture that was right when HE was doing it?
Nothing except that someone besides himself was wielding a
palette knife
But why would he do such a thing, huh? What is it that he
was wanting and trying to achieve, exactly, and why?
Well, he actually told us. In a recent email, he stated that,
and I quote: I had rather hoped that like anti-war.com and
> smirkingchimp.com, both of which added tens of thousands of donating
> members, and large gifts, through providing similar fare to that which
> I was attempting to establish on the BBS, that we could establish some
> relevance outside of the enthusiastic but broke "kernal" community.
In other words, his stated aim is to subvert the stated purpose
of the CoV (to formulate a rational yet infectious religion), and to hijack
it in order to convert it into just another anti-American, anti-Bush hate
site, for the sake of his ideological unction combined with the possibility
of extracting filthy lucre from fellow US and Bush haters. I strongly
consider such a plot to be an undermining and betrayal of the high
ideals for which virions are supposed to stand. He objected to
someone (me) providing differing (and extremely academically credible)
perspectives from his, and criticized my actions as 'list spamming',
although they were nothing other than what he himself had previously
done, with the caveat that I, unlike the 'ideologically pure' Hermit,
included several articles with which I personally or politically disgreed
(as long as they were reasonably well done), something which I cannot
cite a single example of him doing.
I also object to his referring to 'Republican' and 'Liberal' wings
on the CoV, for many reasons:
1) Many liberals, such as Michael J. Totten, Norman Geras,
Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, support the Bush
administration's War on Terror and the US actions in Afghanistan and
Iraq. It must've been particularly galling for Hermit when I posted their
essays.
2) Many Paleoconservatives, such as Patrick Buchanan,
Roberty Novak and Charley Reese (whom Hermit once approvingly
cited), oppose these actions.
3) I myself am a social liberal, a fiscal conservative and a
foreign policy realist. I am also a registered Democrat, but my
candidate is not out there. I cannot support Bush in the next election
(and did not vote for him in the last - I was a Gore voter) due to his
domestic social and fiscal policies; for instance, his antiabortion stance
and his desire to blur the line separating church and state, and the fact
that he is squandering our Clinton-engineered chance to pay down the
national debt (economically, both tax-and-spend Democrats and
borrow-and-spend Republicans are bad news for our country's fiscal
health down the road), with his voodoo-economics supply-side tax cut
(his dad labeled Reagans' fiscal policy correctly) in the middle of a
necessarily costly global-in-scope military program, but I cannot
stomach the Islamofascistically appeasatory stances of the nine
Democratic dwarves currently running against him. For instance, they
widely criticized Bush for his 'bring them on' remark, as encouraging
attacks upon our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I saw it as a lucid
ploy to morph those foreign countries into jihadist flypaper, so they
could die against well-armed and on-guard military troops on foreign
soil rather than murder thousands of clueless civilians here within out
own borders, as they did in 9/11 (remember that? It's been less than
TWO YEARS). By both parties, From Carter on (the hostage crisis
paralysis) through Reagan (the Beirut barracks and embassy bombing
and out subsequent withdrawal), through Bush I (our flight from
Somalia) and Clinton (his desultory cruise missile lobs after major Al
Quaeda attacks), appeasement has been tried, and has simply
emboldened the Islamofascist terrorists to new and more massive
attacks, culminating in the 9/11 atrocity. Thus, for the first time in my
voting history (since I was 18), I may find myself sitting out the next
election. But I am more discerning than the kind of neanderthal Bush-
hater (a doppelganger clone of the neanderthal Clinton-haters of the
past) who in an unconscious, reflexive, unintellectual, nonanalying,
prejudiced and knee-jerk fashion, either supports or opposes any policy
whatsoever, foreign or domestic, simply because of its author, or his/her
political party.
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