"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
"Brain Trust?" Really?
ReplyDeleteDamn, that's sad.
I think Duncan is only in it for the ad money. It's either that or remembering the glory days when someone was hired to play something a bit like him to show up in a scene on West Wing. I wouldn't have known about that unless I looked at his wiki bio a few weeks back when I decided to write those posts about his hosting trolls. Even Dave Garroway had more than that to look back on. That's pretty sad too.
ReplyDeleteI'm experimenting with how to handle someone who is telling pretty serious lies about me on a once prominent blog and the owner, knowing about that, allowing it to happen. Someone told me that since he has deleted comments and banned people, Duncan might have some kind of obligation to do something about it. But I've been kind of busy with students coming back and all. But that doesn't mean I'll stay busy.
I'm experimenting with how to handle someone who is telling pretty serious lies about me on a once prominent blog and the owner, knowing about that, allowing it to happen.
ReplyDeleteNot to critique your response to that (not sure what I'd do if it were me), but I've always thought: seriously? They've got nothing better to do?
Never understood that mentality. It's part of the reason I finally broke my habit and left, and haven't looked back (fortunately for me, new habits are easy to acquire).
It's a lie that I made an antiSemitic remark. If it had been most other things I'd ignore it but that kind of thing tends to get repeated over and over again. Simels has been saying it for ages now and his wanna-be Grover Dill, Gomez, has started in on it too. Oddly none of my avowed good friends at E-ton has so much as objected to it as a distortion. Which was an education in itself. I'd always thought that friends defended each other against such things.
ReplyDeleteAn accusation of antisemitism is different.
An accusation of antisemitism is different.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is.
Of course, anytime you didn't praise Israel when Simels was around, you were being anti-Semitic.
Why he was tolerated was always a mystery to me.
What I said, in response to his proposal to set up a "homeland" for "Gypsies" in an abandoned mall in Jersey, was that I thought it was a shame that more Jews hadn't been allowed into the United States to become citizens - as his Simelsship is - or that a part of the United States hadn't been offered to set up a Jewish "homeland" instead of putting it in Palestine with the history of being in a perpetual state of war. That was my "antisemitic statement". I mean, how provocative can it get? I mean, would saying something like that about any other ethnic group be called bigotry?
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, you noted that earlier, didn't you?
ReplyDeleteStill don't see what's anti-Semitic about it. As I said, anything not in praise of Israel Simels condemned as wishing the death of Jews; or something equally nonsensical.
And his statement is disgusting, if not blatantly racist (is it right to call Roma a "race"?). But screaming "Anti-Semite" is an easy way to shut down the conversation, isn't it?
That must be some kind of corollary to Godwin's Law.
It is interesting, though, how unless you express completely uncritical devotion to what Israel is doing - something that the Eschaton crowd doesn't seem to feel about any other country, including The United States - you can be successfully characterized as an antisemite. Which is screwy.
ReplyDeleteI do have to thank the Eschaton crowd, they've been instrumental in showing me many of the problems of "the left" which ensures the political impotence which has plagued it and the country in the wake of figures such as The Reverend King. They don't take all the credit, the internet, reading the unedited thinking of many who are considered to be "the left" has done that but they're where I spent too much time over the past eleven years. Might as well get something other than a totally conventional POV out of it.
It is interesting, though, how unless you express completely uncritical devotion to what Israel is doing - something that the Eschaton crowd doesn't seem to feel about any other country, including The United States - you can be successfully characterized as an antisemite. Which is screwy.
ReplyDeletePeople in Israel are far more critical of their government than we are allowed to be in public in this country.
Here we are all expected to be more Catholic than the Pope.
It is screwy. I'm also fascinated by the fact that Christians and Muslims can be castigated relentlessly by atheists in this country (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc.), but never Jews.
Antisemitism, donchaknow? (Not that I want to spread the misery; quite the opposite, in fact.)
When you read the Israeli press, it's amazing how they say things about the government that no one in the United States would get away with saying on TV, the radio or in a major newspaper.
ReplyDeleteIn the piece I wrote about Simels' libeling me that I linked to the other day, I copied a comment that "Macacawitz (noteworthy name in itself) in which he accused "The joos" of responsibility for the entire range of sexual dysfunction, etc. in Simels' presence without it being noted. I even called Simels' attention to it and it was commented on.
I'm coming to think that anyone who puts up a comment thread, when their attention is called to it containing libelous material should be required to take it down. And I think anyone who provides that kind of forum has some responsibility for the nature of it, moral though perhaps not legal. I think a lot of people have fled Eschaton due to the sheer nastiness and bigotry that is kewl there.
Yup.
ReplyDelete