I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala's endorsements are below my favorite quotations! Keep scrolling!
Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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Comments on posts over 21 days old are now moderated, and it may take me a long while to notice and allow them.
I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
If you like my blog, and would like to help me continue to afford food and prescriptions, or simply enjoy my blogging and writing, and would like to support it --
you are welcome to do so via the PayPal buttons.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
Surveillance video recovered by Montreal police shows a masked man throwing a firebomb at the door of an orthodox Jewish school in an attack early Saturday.
[...]
Police said a neighbour heard what sounded like a window breaking just after midnight and looked out to see the main entrance of the Taldos Yakov Yosef school in Outremont in flames.
In the video, the man takes a few steps toward the entrance, then steps back to throw a lighted Molotov cocktail. He removes his mask as he steps out of the video frame, but his face is not visible.
Although officials of Jewish groups disagree, police have been unwilling to declare the attack a hate crime. In the absence of graffiti or other other evidence, it is being treated as an unexplained case of arson.
Yeah, doubtless just another random fire bug. There's no history here.
Even so, it has stirred memories of a firebomb attack that destroyed the library of Montreal's United Talmud Torah school in 2004.
A note left at the school said the fire was in retaliation for the Israeli army's killing of a leader of the Hamas militant group.
But what's a little firebombing between friends?
Follow-up: a $5000, Canadian, reward is being offered for information, which isn't exactly a major amount of money.
Elsewhere, on the Disgusting Front, here is an anodyne article on discrimination against Muslims in America since 9/11; anyone who would deny that there's prejudice and overt discrimination against Muslims in America since then (if not before), must be either blind, or something else, right?
A recent Gallup poll showed that 39 percent of Americans admit to being prejudiced against Muslims and that nearly a quarter say they would not want a Muslim for a neighbor.
Let's go to the blogs, and look at some responses.
Here is highly popular rightish blog Wizbang, and some comments on the article by blogger Jay Tea:
When Muslims in America are anywhere near as endangered as, say, a Jew in Saudi Arabia or A Dane anywhere in the Muslim world (remember, all Danes were guilty because one newspaper published cartoons depicting Mohammed, and that was later extended to all Westerners who didn't join in condemning the newspaper -- and quite a few who did), then I'll take CAIR's whining semi-seriously. Or, at least, pretend to. Until that day, all I have to say to them is to ask how many of their past leaders have been arrested and/or deported on charges of supporting terrorists. I've lost count.
But better are the fine upstanding citizens of the comments there:
I couldn't cair less about the 'discrimination' of the poor muzzies. Just maybe, it they would quit mass MURDERING people, they might get more respect. Posted by: La Mano at September 4, 2006 11:24 AM
[...]
Our problem is not that we are not intolerant enough.
When we finally get real about this problem, CAIR will be squeeling like a little girl at her 5th birthday party.
That's what we need to prove we're on the right track. Posted by: Mitchell at September 4, 2006 12:13 PM
And so on. Charming, isn't it?
As I've been pointing out since 2001, while violence and threats against Jews are up, it's become overtly acceptable in various areas of American society to overtly slur Muslims in the most vicious and disgusting terms possible.
I've not checked the king of racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry on the net, Little Green Footballs, in more than a year. Let's see how they're doing today, and if they've cleaned up their act since earning their reputation.
The top post at the moment is an attack on DailyKos and CAIR. Let's go to the comments.
[...] There's nothing that the Jews have that the muslims don't want to steal.
[...]
Nope, its more like Muslims are the Monster from the old Mel Brooks'movie. They may dress up and try to appear normal, but its all a cheap facade.
[...]
The Muslims are the new Barbarians. And the old. If the West wakes up too late, we will die.
[...]
Muslims are the new Borg, assimilate or you will be destroyed. Sounds more like it.
[...]
so this means... French Muslims are SisterFu*kers
[...]
I think we will start to see a very real threat of domestic terrorism when the Left, out of desperation and a bid for relevance, allies itself with the islamofascists. This is the true threat islam imposes on the West.
[...]
Did the KKKos KKKiddies mean that the Muslims are the "new Jews" in the sense that all Mohammed did was steal the Old (and New)Testament(s) when he had his "revelations"?
[...]
I'd say from my perspective that Americans, especially white American males, are the new jews.
[...]
actually, Muslims are the new Commies, as far as I'm concerned.
[...]
Muslims are the New Molech Worshipers, you know child sacrifices and all.
[...]
No Muslims are the new NAZI's. Jews were victims, Muslims are not victims they are the perpetrators of horrible violence throughout the world in the name of "Allah." They are a pre-enlightenment pack of jackals messing up the world on a daily basis.
To believe other than the above is to live in denial.
[...]
is there a category for "scared to death" of Islam? if so, place me there.
[...]
Muslims the new Jews? Muslims are persecuting and terrorizing people around the world. Who are they to call themselves victims of anything?
Nope, no vile bigotry there any more. No threats. Clearly Charles has cleaned up his act since I last checked. Good job.
But maybe that was a fluke. Let's check the thread below that one, a post about, hmm, allegations of persecution of Muslims in America, and the term "Islamofascism":
The Gramscian Whore rides the Islamic Taqiyyalope Beast to the intended Caliph fate.
[...]
Just imagine if they actually were persecuted here.
Keep it up, you may get your wish.
[...]
Boo F'n Hoo... I'ts not like we're sawing off heads or any such thing like that. Get used to it, my b*tches!
[...]
The Islamic virus has entered the body politic through the immune deficiency of political correctness, and is now proceeding to ravage the host. The press prides itself on being the immune system of democracy by repelling lies, but is totally servile and acquiescent before this sinister invader.
[...]
Uh, islamofascism is simply islam being itself. You can't sugarcoat a turd and call it a pastry: it's still a turd.
[...]
Let's see, an Iranian born Imam is in the newspaper complaining that Muslims are being unfairly stereotyped.
What do you want to bet he knowingly harbors terrorists in his congregation?
[...]
Violence and mayhem are inherent to Islam. Islam has been the source of terror for centuries, and Israel is just their latest excuse.
[...]
Islam is sick joke invented by the ultimate con artist, Muhammad. The only reason I pay attention to them is because they have oil and weaponry
[...]
Assimilate or get out.
[...]
Muslims insist they're American too.
Casual lying is a feature of Arab culture...(We're going to land the planes don't anyone do anything stupid).
Meanwhile, lots of the commenters complained about comment #13, and it was deleted. As usual, Charles deletes offensive comments.
Meanwhile, play the game I always do: change the words "Muslim" or "Islam," or their other forms in the comments above to "Christian" or "Jew" or "atheist" or something you believe in. Would you find these views acceptable, tolerable, or something you'd care to associate yourself with?
And these are not exceptional comments on LGF; they are the rule. Post after post. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. Tens of thousands of such hate-filled comments.
There remains no greater cesspool of hatred and bigotry in the blogosphere, it seems, than Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs. It has earned its reputation fairly.
Johnson deletes "offensive" comments, and assiduously blocks links he doesn't like (don't be surprised if the above links stop working if he notices this post). If he wanted to not publish the above sort of comments, he could either delete them (and thus pretty much eliminate 90% of his comments), or close comments. Instead, he chooses to publish hundreds of these remarks a day. Every day.
Charles' sidebar stats at the moment:
Comments: 3,084,576 Today: 1,164 Yesterday: 2,771
See for yourself, if you like. Pick any random long comment thread with more than 100 comments, and look.
This is the face of modern American hate. Its name is Little Green Footballs.
ADDENDUM 3:24 p.m.: Here is a look at two actual young American Muslims, rather than imaginary bogey-men.
[...] Al-Sarraf, raised in a multiethnic family that frequently discussed how Islam fit into mainstream America, was propelled into a leadership role aimed at integrating Muslims into broader society.
Basim Hawa, son of Palestinian immigrants, went from ignoring many tenets of his religion to thinking actively about what they meant to him and, ultimately, throwing off the trappings of American life that didn't fit with Islam.
[...]
"The natural trend of immigrant communities," he said, is that "the first generation comes, establishing itself. Then the next generation has a different set of issues, figuring out who they are and how they fit in."
The terrorist attacks accelerated that process. "There was this pressure on the Muslim community to grow up in a year, when it's a 20-year process."
Last year, when Al-Sarraf awoke to hear that four young Muslims had blown themselves up in the London subways and killed 52 other people, he felt chilled. The four were not unlike him and his friends: middle class, educated, raised in the West. And yet the bombers were so alienated from their environment that they had sought to destroy it.
Just as after Sept. 11, Al-Sarraf's impulse was to take action, feeling "that we need to address the issue before it gets as far here as it did in other places." Al-Sarraf did not see extreme isolationist Islamic groups in the United States, but he felt it was up to his generation to take a stand.
"Who's going to be the ones to address it?" he asked. "And the realization was that . . . it's us."
[...]
"No one will enter paradise if his or her neighbors will not feel safe from them," said Magid, his lively cadence accented by his native Arabic. "My neighbor, whether Muslim or not Muslim, must feel I am not doing harm to him, whether by having loud music, or having a fight over a parking space or having water sitting around breeding mosquitoes."
[...]
Afterward, Magid said that he worries when young people go to extremes, staying in the mosque all day and calling movies or sports or social activities haram, forbidden. To him, these are part of a balanced spiritual life.
"All the extremism now in Britain, all this is because people have the wrong idea of what religion is. I tell young people, 'You have three choices in America -- isolate yourself; assimilate and do everything in popular culture that you're going to do; or integrate' -- and that's what we're advising people to do."
Magid does not sanction all mainstream American activities -- adult co-ed swimming and shopkeepers selling alcohol are not all right with him. But he is troubled by those who preach against a long list of American activities, from celebrating Thanksgiving to shaking hands with non-Muslims.
Hawa is constantly making decisions on when to participate and when to excuse himself. He and Ballve don't celebrate birthdays, but they play soccer and go to her parents' house for Thanksgiving.
"Everybody has their own little ways," he said, sitting with his wife and 7-month-old son, Hamza, in their Sterling apartment. "For example, if a female put out her hand to shake it, then I would, but maybe someone else I know who celebrates birthdays wouldn't shake a woman's hand. These are forms of jihad -- struggles we go through."
[...]
"I don't agree with all the decisions that our government makes. But the reason why I'm here is I do love the country. And it's a land of opportunity. And the life here is much easier than life overseas. I do consider myself an American Muslim."
[...]
Over the winter holidays, Al-Sarraf visited London and was struck by how second-generation Muslims viewed themselves as more tied to their parents' native countries than to England.
"I didn't get the sense of the British identity being an important aspect," he said.
[...]
The ADAMS Center and GWU's Muslim Student Association try to combat that by holding events with Jewish and Christian groups. The MSA has held Eid banquets with campus Jewish organizations and sponsored a dialogue between Muslim and Jewish students.
Al-Sarraf called the meetings "a way of humanizing one another."
Reality, or crazed, paranoid, bigoted view. Pick one.
Besides LGF, another depressing way to read ugly, racist, misogynist comments is simply by clicking on the "Discuss" button at the bottom of almost any article on Yahoo! News. Ewww, to say the least.
And, of course, the hate-filled imprison/sodomize/kill comments about "the LibTards" on, I swear, every discussion thread on Yaho! News.
Meanwhile, play the game I always do: change the words "Muslim" or "Islam," or their other forms in the comments above to "Christian" or "Jew" or "atheist" or something you believe in. Would you find these views acceptable, tolerable, or something you'd care to associate yourself with?
Somebody making similar comments about Jews back in the days of Bar Kokhba would have had a point.
Come to think of it, somebody making similar comments about Christians during the Crusades would have had a point.
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